Even though I’ve been blogging and publishing content online for over 10 years, I still make mistakes and I’m sure the vast majority of us do so too. That’s why it’s always important to learn from
mistakes, both from yourself and others.
Websites generally are successful, with regards to gaining traffic, from search engines. Web users search for search phrases, they click onto your website, and then they leave when they found what they were looking for.
Although its good many websites concentrate on SEO and organic traffic generation, it can also be seen to be a problem. What about social media? More importantly, what about retaining web users on your website? After all, the longer a web user is on your website, the more valuable they are to you. With this in mind, here are three things every website needs to implement to help retain web users on their website.
Dedicated Homepage for Converting
For most blogs and content mills, the homepage will appear as a ‘latest blog posts’ page, highlighting the newest blog posts that have been published on the website. As much as this does show what is relevant on the website etc., it is a very basic homepage that has not been optimised, in the slightest, for the traffic going to the website.
For this reason, always try to make a dedicated homepage for your website. Have a product? Mention it on the homepage. Have categories that web users are likely to enjoy reading about? Including that on the homepage. Whatever it is you think is best for your web users, it will be a darn site better than the standard ‘latest posts’ homepage.
A Dedicated 404 Page
A 404 page is the page web users will visit when they are pointed to a page that does not exist on your website. 404 pages are very standard, by default, usually saying something like ‘Whoops, that page doesn’t exist’.
Of course, we shouldn’t have an 404 errors on our website. But, they do creep up and when they do, creating a dedicated 404 page has the potential to retain traffic rather than them exiting the page.
A User-Focused Sitemap
When you think of sitemaps, you tend to think of crawl robots from search engines exploring the content on your website to process for their results pages. However, it is also a good idea to have a sitemap for web users too, so they can see just what content is on your website, and how much of it is on there.
It tends to be a good idea to have a user focused sitemap in the footer. If you can make it easy for web users to explore your content, then it definitely should be easy for Google and other search engines to do so too!
