Tips to Keep Visitors Stick to your Site

 ADVANCED STICKY SEO TIP SHEET
- by David Leonhard

If you have already read about Sticky SEO and you are already practicing good, basic Sticky SEO, you might be ready for these advanced Sticky SEO tricks and tips. When the length of time a visitor stays on your site plays a critical role in how many more visitors the search engines send your way, website owners will have added incentive to keep people on their site longer, even if they are not interested in buying. There are various ways to keep people on your website besides having well-written and useful text.

 WHITE HAT STICKY SEO TECHNIQUES 

If you have never heard the term, in the world of SEO, “white hat” refers to good, honest, and ethical ways of manipulating the information that search engines feed their clientele. In other words, the less sneaky and generally-accepted techniques of promoting a website in the search engine rankings.(In contrast, “black hat” is the dark side, the evil ways of manipulating those same results).Here are a few ways to keep people longer on your website that might be considered white hat.

• Give a video option on every page. Not everybody wants to view a video, but some people do.And those people will stay longer and bring up the average length of page views. If you can make the videos both entertaining and useful, some visitors will watch several of them.And video has proven to be a very effective and engaging sales technique. It allows people to better visualize you, your service or your product, which is a key process of salesmanship that we expect in the offline world.
• Open all external links in a new window. Some websites do this anyway. They don’t mind linking out, but they don’t want to lose the potential client, so they keep a window with their website open this way. It might or might not be beneficial to make all internal links open in a new window, depending on whether the search engines measure how long people stay on the actual page they sent people to. 

• Post your phone number prominently. Not only will you close more sales, but while dialing, waiting, then speaking to you, your website remains open, increasing the stickiness as viewed by the search engines. A phone number also increases trust online. Whether a person uses the phone number or not, it tells them there is a real, reachable person available should there arise any problems.
• Quizzes. Not everyone has time for quizzes, but those who do will spend a long time doing them. People like to test their knowledge.And once they get started, they are committed and stay for a very long time. Quizzes are a great way to engage people, they can even form an important part of the sales process (revealing to potential clients just how much they don’t know and therefore why they should hire your services, for example) and they boost the average length of visit to your website.
• 404 tips. Make sure your 404 error page gives people options forward so they don’t go back. A custom 404 error page should have full navigation of the site, perhaps with some suggestions or most of the elements of the home page.
• Go Deep. Give your visitors more reasons to go deep. Assuming you already cater to all the niches that land on your website and to all the personality types looking for information, try also giving them other reasons to go deep, such as sign up for a free, no-obligation trial. Or to read about case studies. Or to view your picture gallery. Or to vote in the current poll.
• Differentiate. While following conventions of navigation might make it easy for your visitors to go deeper into your website, You might also like to differentiate either your look or your content. Same-old same-old doesn’t captivate a person’s attention the way unique, original or even curious does. In fact, if you apply the principles followed by master copywriters, your website will be what they like to call “hypnotic”.
• Go social. This might just be the biggest change the Usefulness Algorithm begets for the Web. The results of the Microsoft Browse Rank paper showed how social websites would do so much better ranking under a system that gives marks for staying a long time on a website. Blogs that engage readers with conversations will do well.Forums will do well.Chat boards will do well. My top advice for clients in the world of the Usefulness Algorithm will be to get some form of social, either a very engaging blog, or a forum or a niche social website.Consider a sector like steel-cutting tools or air purifier sales, full of brochure websites and e-commerce sites – imagine how that niche will be shaken up by the first company that adds a social element to its website.

Stay tuned to http://www.howgoogleranks.com for new SEO tips and articles to improve your Google rank.

Any thoughts or comments would be highly appreciated. Thanks!