The Ready Room – Keep Traffic on your Website

Welcome to The Ready Room, where I explore random topics to help you kick off your week.

This week’s topic targets a small developer trick to help keep traffic on your website. This is geared toward anyone who maintains a small business site or a blog like WordPress or Wix. If you have a developer maintaining your website, they’ll likely already have a more advanced script for this.

Manipulating Anchor Links

Ever look at your website’s analytics and scratch your head wondering why so many people are coming to your website but not engaged in the content? What I mean is, your traffic data shows readers stay on your site for a page or two—maybe even as little as 20 seconds—then they’re gone. Guess what? You’re probably sending them away and don’t even know it.

By default, web browsers open links in the same window, or tab if you’re a Firefox user like me. So if a reader is engaged in an article on your site, and you’ve linked to your friend’s website, once that user clicks the link, they’re gone. Your friend has the user now and you’ve lost them. Wave goodbye to your book sale. Okay, that’s a bit over-dramatic, but the question becomes, how do you get them back?

Easy.

Don’t lose them in the first place.

Links on your website should open in one of two ways: in the same tab/window only if they link to another area of your website, or open in a new tab/window if the link takes readers to an entirely different website and server.

If you’ve linked to an exterior source, make sure that link opens in a new tab or window. This will keep the reader on your pages and still offer them access to the exterior source. It will also keep your web traffic where it belongs… with you.

Here’s how:

If you hand-code your links like I sometimes do, drop this bit of code into your anchor tag (i.e. your ‘a’ tag).

target="_blank"

If you use a blogging system like WordPress, click the little pen icon to edit the link in your article and tick the ‘open in new tab’ checkbox.

Remember, you want to keep readers on your site.

Every website is unique in its presence and scope, and you want yours to shine along with the best of them. Keep readers on your website and engaged in your content. If you want to know more information about this topic, you can check out HTML.com or see where your Google-Fu takes you.

If you like this article, be sure to check out The Ready Room for more tips and tricks. You can also subscribe to this blog and be the first to know when new content is delivered.