Keeping people on your website for as long as possible is something everyone who owns a website wrestles with. The longer people stay on your site, the more engaged they become, the more you can sell—whether it’s your services or web advertisements. But how do you do it? How do you engage your visitors and entice them to click through more of your pages?

Getting 1,000,000 unique visitors a month will not matter that much if they are all leaving in droves as soon as they get to your homepage. Keeping that traffic on your website is just as important as getting them to your website in the first place. —SloDive

Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, tackles this very topic in one of his recent “Ask Gerber” videos on Inc.com. I found his points to be helpful, so I thought I’d share some of his tips, along with tips from others, in this blog post.

Embed Slideshows and Videos

Scott Gerber’s video on Inc.com was just under 3 minutes long, and I had to watch a 30 second CapitalOne commercial beforehand. After Gerber was done sharing his tips, Emerson Spartz, founder of Spartz Media, came on to share his own tips. I watched the whole thing. Sure, I thought the guys were talking WAY too fast, but I understand that they are trying to squeeze a lot of information into a short amount of time. No one wants to watch a really long video. When I worked for Inc.com, one of the things I got to do was create slideshows to accompany some of the stories I wrote. These slideshows were added visual content that complimented my stories, and I thought they worked really well. It was a way for people to learn more about a topic in a different way—with out the hassle of all those annoying words…

Video can be used in so many ways that can be engaging to the user. It can be a way to showcase your product or service, learn about the company, meet the employees, get testimonials from customers, create training videos, how to videos, or video blogs. —StayOnSearch

Videos and slideshows should be kept short so you don’t lose the attention span of your viewer. But done right, videos and slideshows can keep people on your site for minutes longer than if they didn’t exist at all.

Break Up Content on Multiple Pages

Have a really long blog post? Put it on two pages! That way your visitors are looking at more pages on your site, boosting your ratings. The more pages people view on your site the more chances they get to engage with your brand and be enticed by advertisers.

Include Links to Complementary Content

Internal links back to your own cornerstone content will keep people on your site and reading your best material. —CopyBlogger

Use keywords to link back to other content on your site. My personal goal is to include at least three internal links for every blog post I write. Most of the time, it’s more. This not only keeps people on your site longer, it offers them additional information on a topic they are interested about.  

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Ciao!! Emilie Wyqued Ampersand Web StudioTags: Client Relations, Design Strategy, Industry, UX, Website Design