Site Navigation Tools: Make it Visitor-Friendly!

Often times, visitors from search engines just leaves your site after they have found what they wanted but wouldn't you want them to continue reading your other good posts too? Well, this is where your site navigational tools will determine if they'll stay longer or not; and I'll attempt to analyze them by showing some of the ways the popular bloggers do it

1. Art of Linking to Your Own Posts!

This is the simplest thing you can do without tinkering with the template or install plugins! If you are writing something related to what you've written before it makes sense to link to it, wouldn't it? This can be done in a few ways:

a. In-Line Linking:

Conveniently drop a link in your sentences with the following tips:

• Spread the links away from each other in the article, you get a higher clickthrough!
• Avoid link crowding too i.e. do not put too many links until it confuses your reader!
• Have a different readable color for your links to separate from the rest of your article

b. Power of Suggestion:

• Top of article: Suggest that a visitor look through your Most Popular Posts/subscribe to your more feed!
• End of the article: Suggest a similar post.

2. Random Posts

Random post is a great way to get your visitors to check out your other posts and explore more of your site! You could be lucky and probably gain another subscriber! You might have noticed SEOnoob also has its own Random Post box right above every article. Here's the code if you want to put it up in your template:

3. 404 - Not Found: Not a Dead End!

Sometimes visitors might have clicked on an old link which might have been deleted already or someone linked to your site but did not type the address correctly. These visitors will end up in your 404 pages! But this is not a dead end! You can still convince the visitor to explore your site by:

a. Showing a Tag Cloud - gives visitors a quick glance at what your blog's mainly about! I did it here by using Ultimate Tag Warrior which I recommended in my earlier post and the following is the code you need to add:

b. Showing Tag List - complementing the Tag Cloud would be a tag list that gives all the tags you've used in columns! This would ease in-page search of what the visitor wants. Uses Tags-in-Columns plugin by cre8d!

4. Digging Up Your Archives!

What better way to drum up interest in your old posts than recycling your old by highlighting them as a weekly special or something fancy like "On this site: One Year Ago? Not only do you get to recycle your old post but you get to save some time writing too!

Here's a Wordpress plugin which is similar to what this hopes to achieve: One Year Ago by lamateporunyogur.

So do you have any other tips to share?

If you like this post, you might be interested in reading "Wordpress SEO: First Steps".

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Wordpress, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.