Cracked the SEO code? Or maybe you are paying dirt cheap on Adwords to drive tons of traffic on your site? Traffic is only 1 part of the equation. Once you’ve figured it out, you need to be able to keep the visitors you funneled right onto your website. It’s of no great use to have people land on your website just to leave immediately without ever coming back.

This article will give you guidelines that should help you to have the page landers do what you want on your site.

1. You have 3 seconds

Web surfers are fast moving. Okay, maybe not in real life, but when they are browsing the web, they do click fast. And hitting the ‘Back’ button is something they’re used to doing. You need to keep them from doing that by passing the “3 second test”.

How? First, your website needs to show credibility, trustworthiness and professionalism.

Next, it needs to look like your visitors are in the right place will be getting what they are looking for.

Design is not everything in a website, but it sure plays a major role.

Here are some quick tips

No flash as far as possible: Flash increases page load time. iPhones don’t support Flash, and it happens to be that loads of people browse the web with their iPhones. Also, other media should be limited to only the minimal.

Clean layout: Nothing is worse than a cluttered website. Have a look at Google’s home page. Simple, but neat. There is no reason you cannot make your navigation and content area clean.

Limited colours: Using every single colour that HTML allows you to is not the way to go. You should be good with a maximum of 4 colours (and a minimum of 2). Your visitors will quickly be able to understand that 1 colour is for links, another is for the content and the other 2 are for things that are important or that you want to stand out.

Fonts and stuff: Great content is of no use if it is illegible. If you don’t know what font to use, pick one of those 3: Arial, Verdana or Tahoma, and you should be good! Provide sub-headlines and bullet points to satisfy your visitors’ need for scanning the page. And to finish this section, if you are not sure about the colours, use what works: black text on a white background!

2. No one wants a gf or bf who has mood swings

Same applies for websites. Google has a certain layout, and it’s nice. Facebook has its own layout, and it’s nice as well. Now imagine performing a search on Google’s homepage and having your search results displayed on a Facebook layout! It’s going to be a complete mess!

You don’t want that. Instead, keep the same logo, the same colours and the same overall layout on all your pages. Of course, your squeeze page has to be slightly different, but the overall look has to feel the same.

3. A bit more about your navigation

A good navigation allows your visitors to see if they can get what they want on your website. If they think they won’t get what they want on your website, they will leave, and that would be really sad if you have what they want, but it’s just that it’s buried too deep in your links.

Some tips to help with the navigation:

1. Keep the top navigation bar simple

2. Have another nav bar in your footer

3. Use breadcrumbs
*A breadcrumb shows the user in which subsection they are, for example:
Women > Jewellery > Rings
All three are links to their respective sections.

4. Too deep is not good.

Ex. Women > Accessories > Jewellery > Neck > Gold > Small > Earrings

No one will bother checking out all the sections. But if you have only 3 levels, they are likely to visit each and every page.

5. There is no use of overwhelming people with navigation to all your pages. Your homepage is NOT a site map. Neither are the rest of your pages. (Imagine having 100 articles on your page…).

6. Have a search bar at the top to help them search for what they want.

7. Text > Graphics > Javascript for navigation, plus text is easier!

I’m not here to overwhelm you with information. Takeaway 100% of the little information discussed here, and you will probably increase your website’s efficiency by 100%! Don’t be lazy, change up your site a bit, it’s only a one-off thing, and you’ll reap the benefits for years to go.

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