Making Links Work For You
Posted by: DSL Web Team on: December 22, 2009
THE LATEST THINKING
Use outbound links sparingly because they drive visitors away from your website. But when you have to, accurately label them so that users know exactly where they’re going. Don’t just say “Click Here.” Make sure all your out-bound links lead to appropriate landing pages. If you’re linking to a subsection of another website, it’s advisable not to link to that site’s home page but rather, to the specific page where you want them to go exactly.
The latest thinking is that your outbound links shouldn’t open a new browser window, but simply take the user to a new page that is still under control of your website. Why? It’s likely some of them won’t as easily find their way back to your site using the browser’s “back” arrow.
CONSERVING YOUR RESOURCES
When Digital Summit develops websites, combining both navigation and functionality with design depends largely on situational contexts. Keeping site visitors on your website is what’s mostly desired so use outbound links sparingly and only if it’s more resource-efficient to employ these.
If other social media websites allow you to publish some content you’d like to share with your audience like a few large-sized video files or photo slide album, rather than ‘house’ the material use outbound links instead. Doing so conserves large amounts of web space and bandwidth consumption. That kind of savings could elsewhere be employed more wisely.
VESTIGE OF THE PAST
When determining what keeps site visitors more engaged on your website, measuring results by page view alone is a vestige of the past. There was a time when the Web consisted mostly of text and images – it made sense then that how many pages a visitor viewed was a true measure of engagement. This isn’t much the case anymore.
These days, you want to look at how long people actually dwell inside your site. The exception, however, is when visitors come to buy from your site – the order processing system normally takes them off your page.
But when people aren’t leaving your website because they’re ready to buy something, it profits you to investigate why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you need to make to get them to stay longer. These insights are critically important to better understanding which content will go viral naturally. Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.
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