In creating a website the goal is to get people to visit it and use the information on the site to their benefit. This can help you get and retain customers, reduce costs and increase ancillary revenues from advertising. The more visitors you have, and the longer they stay on your site, the more valuable the site becomes.
How does one do this?
If you have the most interesting content in the world, then people are going to visit your site to read it and look it over. As we have talked about before, you have to target the information and your marketing plan as a whole. So, for example, a person interested in golf is looking for the standing at the U.S. Open, while a person into hair care is looking for something quite different. Your content and message has to be targeted to the segment of the market you want to reach.
As part of your content, you can include interactive media, which could be articles, posts, images and other graphics. By doing this you can attract more people to your site, and see which ones actually look through your pages and content.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to create lists and graphics that engage the visitor in your content. If you’re a dermatologist you may create a list of the “5 Best Skin Creams”. Listing these, you can then create content explaining and showing why you are ranking them, and pluses and minuses to each one.
A nutritionist could create a meme that is clickable to a list of the “10 Most Nutritious Fruits of Summer”. You get the point. People like to see lists of products and interactive media they can click on to take them to something they are interested in.
Be careful to keep the list consistent with your own website’s purpose and other content on your site. Search engines might think that a beauty site that has a listing of the “5 Best Flashlights” on it might be trying to game the system.
If you have the resources to split the pages up so visitors will need to visit more pages on your site, that works as long as it’s not too difficult. In other words, when you click the graphic that says “5 Best Walking Shoes” you can have it go to #5 first, then have a link to #4, the #3 and so on. Each time a visitor clicks the next number, they are taken to a page about that one, so in order to get to #1, they would visit 5 different pages.
People love interactive links and content and it gives you a chance to be creative and keep them on your site.
