Published in Marketing on Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no?
I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site.
This strategy never makes me a passionate user.
What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content.
So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal.
Here we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that manuscript post isn't quite ready yet.)
What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site.
We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too).
We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)?
As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing.
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
Comments and Feedback
Great idea! Navigating via search and tags is so much quicker for users than trying to interpret site structure.
Awesome idea. Related post plugins and such follow a similar idea, but I would imagine this would work even better for search engine traffic.
Yes off course i agreed with you,but in addition to this,The Keyword density of your content is also important and many more things too.
I like the idea, I will certainly try it..the only question is...is it not good concise navigation and content that makes a user happy
I agree, Content is the most important thing to true seo. Everybody is looking for the magic formula. The formula is time and hard work.