Keep Them Coming Back For More - How to Get Repeat Visitors to Your Website

The most important two aspects of any website design build is:

• Usability
• Content

We talk about usability in terms of the user being able to find the information they wanted. The best way to construct a website is to imagine you do not have the luxury of a search facility on your site, and that users have to find information using the navigation system alone. Now that's shifted the goalposts hasn't it...

But this alone isn't enough. You can't expect your customers to spend time trawling through your site to find their information. It needs to be there in front of them, within 2 to 3 clicks. No more than that.

Think about it... If you visit a website that is impossible to navigate and too much of a task to find what you want, there's only one thing you are going to do... bounce straight back to where you came from. And you need to ensure your site visitors aren't doing just that - "bouncing".

An example of a bounce from a website would be when a user has searched for a particular phrase via a search engine, and clicked the first result presented to them. This takes them into the website, they take one look at the homepage (for instance it's cluttered, unclear navigation and a complete mess) and think "good god, this isn't what I wanted", and click the "Back" button on their web browser, taking them back to the search results.

Now this "bounce rate" is one of the factors that Google and other search engines consider when ranking sites. If they see a website in their results and people are bouncing straight off of it, then they are going to assign less authority to this site. At the end of the day, search engines want websites in their index that are relevant, and what users are looking for. And if you've got a high bounce rate on your site, you need to fix this pronto.

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking your bounce rate, and I would firmly recommend it. They also allow tracking of the time users spent on your website, which is another search engine ranking factor. So you want to keep visitors on your page for as long as possible.

For more information on SEO and online marketing techniques, check out the 3dubs online marketing blog.