Jul
How Visitors Navigate Your Site
I read some great research over the weekend on site visitors’ habits–how they look around and find things they’re seeking on the sites they visit, but as I went back today to find the URLs of the articles, I couldn’t. The site where I found them had moved on to new topics and changed its hotlinks.
Anyway, in a nutshell, here’s what several different research studies showed: Visitors to sites ignore navigation bars, banner ads and pretty much anything that’s not in the middle of the screen and isn’t text-based. Therefore, they will do one of two things on a page they visit–click on a text-based link they see that appears to be what they’re looking for, or hit the back button and get the hell out of the site.
At first blush, that’s pretty discouraging because we all go to great ends to silo our pages into neat categories, etc., only to discover that our intricate navigation schemes are all for naught. But if you think about it further, it’s not that discouraging. First, building our well-organized navigational structure helps the spiders find us and index our pages. That’s a plus. And, knowing how visitors are going to view and use our pages gives us an edge in designing content.
Consider Wikipedia. This is one of the highest ranked sites at Google and also one of the most visited in the world. What’s its secret? Well, content, of course, but within that content lie bunches and bunches of text-based hotlinks.
Voila! That’s the key. Build your text with all kinds of neat linking devices, even–and especially–if they’re just internal links that take your visitors to places where they may take some action, such as buying something from you.
Lastly, though I didn’t find the research articles I wanted to link to, I did discover this nifty all-in-site site check tool. Try it out on your site.
Tags: text-based hotlinks, well-organized navigational structure
