Getting visitors to your site (otherwise known as traffic) is one of the big keys to internet marketing. After all, no traffic, no sales. No sales, no money! But one of the other big keys is keeping your visitors in your site, instead of having them hit the Back button and leaving out the way they came in. There are basically two reasons you want to keep your visitors in your site. One: unless they read your content and hopefully take some sort of action, you're not going to get paid. Two: Google keeps track of the percentage of your visitors who land on a page and then hit the Back button to leave-it's called the Bounce Rate. Needless to say, you want a lower Bounce Rate, instead of a higher one. No one knows for sure, but your Bounce Rate does have an impact on how highly your site is ranked.

So, to help you keep your visitors in your site longer, and to encourage them to browse more of your pages, here are a few tips for you to try out.

Tip 1: Great Content

You absolutely must have great content. You've undoubtedly been to a site where you start reading the content and think to yourself something like "this is pure, meaningless fluff!" Don't write pure, meaningless fluff! Write content that's really going to address your visitors' issues. The whole reason 80% of people are online anyway is to find information. Nielsen-Online did a survey of online behavior and found that a huge percentage of people who ended up buying something first started off online merely looking for information.

You need to know what your intended audience wants to know. Ideally you should have walked at least part way in their proverbial shoes. You need to know what they're worried about, and what keeps them up at night. You need to know their hot buttons and write your content so that it hits them where they live.

Give people one article or post about what they want to know, and they'll gladly delve deeper into your site for more!

Tip 2: Give Them Something to Do

The more you can involve your visitors, the better. Surveys are a great way to involve folks. Make sure they're surveys about topics they care about. Asking about preferred vacation sites on a website devoted to dog training is not what you want to do. (Unless you're talking about a take-your-dog-along vacation.) Asking about preferred foods is a good topic.

Tip 3: Give Your Visitors a Voice!
One of the reasons why blogs are so popular with both internet marketers and visitors alike is they naturally allow people to put in their two cents. You need some way to encourage comments. If you're running a WordPress blog, for instance, there are plug-ins that keep track of top commentators. This is a great way to get your visitors to not only hang around longer, but to enter into the conversation and take some ownership of your website.

Surely, there are other ways to accomplish the task of keeping your website's visitors involved. But these three are some of the best. Remember, it all starts with content. So, if you do nothing else, start out by writing truly worth content.