Everyone is trying to rank well in search engines to enjoy a good amount of free traffic every month. But if you look closely at the server stats, you’ll notice that most people leave almost immediately after entering the site. You can’t complain about your sales because the fact is that people in general don’t like to stay in any one place for a long time.

Eliminate clutter

The basic rule of thumb in website building today is to have as much content as possible to please the search engines. However, cramming too much content into a page without good techniques can drive your visitors away. This is also the common problem of most websites nowadays. Research shows that people generally don’t stay on a site for more than 30 seconds, but my personal experience tells me it’s 10 seconds. The implication of this is that you only have 10 seconds to present your idea and persuade them to stay.

Reveal some but do not reveal all

An effective website must accomplish 2 things in 10 seconds. A) The user must know what your site is about. B) The user must be motivated to stay and investigate further.

To achieve A) cannot be done with long stories. People are lazy and don’t like to read or scroll. So there should be an obvious sentence, tagline, or graphic that tells them what your site is about. Once they are interested in your presentation, they will start reading the content.

As for the content, I suggest you write enough to spark interest. If all your stories are told within one page, then they no longer need to navigate your site. This is similar to watching movie trailers. The preview has to encourage the audience to pay and watch the full movie. If you can achieve B), you have a chance to get them to stick around and click on your links.

Guide the eye to important content

People first look at the biggest, boldest element on a page, which is usually the logo, top banner, or tagline, as mentioned above. Next, you need to direct your gaze to the content. Text with highlighted headings can stand out prominently. The common technique for making a header obvious is to highlight the header background with a dark color and write the header text in white. Many popular portals like msn and bbc are using this technique. White background on dark text is more effective for main content because it has very good contrast.

Watch out for distractions

Remember the 10 second rule. You don’t want to distract your visitors within this time frame. Although advertisements are commonly used for marketing purposes, they are considered distractions. Animated gifs are another type of distraction that can be very annoying. In fact, I don’t encourage people to use animated gifs at all! If you really want animation, do a good job with flash. Unless your site is like Yahoo or Google, people won’t bother staying long if they’re confused about what you’re saying.

use images

Playing with the colors and layout of your site is not enough. You need identifiable graphics, like humans and objects, to make your visitors feel comfortable. Many people are very afraid of using graphics because they are worried about the download time. Valid point but you don’t have to use large images. Images that are about 10 kb in size are a good guide. To me, making your visitors happy by making them wait a few more milliseconds is good business. Quality images that describe your content are very effective. It also makes your site less boring and creates visual stops for your content.

conclusion

People are impatient and you really have little time for them to stay longer on your site. The longer they stick around, the more likely they are to buy into your idea and use your services. The first impression is important and we all want it to be a good one.