[Work] I'd like to continue picking your brains.

[davywavy]

I recently discovered, much to my astonishment, that my company's website gets a lot of traffic - somewhere in the region of 2.5x as much traffic as the site of my nearest competitor, according to their latest figures. The vast, socking majority of this traffic is coming off search engines - i.e., it isn't people who know about us already and making direct requests, but people making searches for info and we're coming up. It appears that my astonishing mad leet SEO skillz have paid bigger dividends than I realised.
As such, needless to say, I'm looking hard at how I can make our website work more for us.

I know a lot of you lot do professional jobs with a certain amount of technical expertise/competence, and so I was wondering if I could ask you a question:

Suppose you're looking for work-related information on the web and find a site with a relevant article. Once you've read the piece and maybe printed it, what features would the site have to offer to get you to stay a bit longer and look around?

Comments

[hardwired.livejournal.com]

Easy Navigation: Left Sidebar and Menu Bar if needed.

Small related links available. Ensure they are interesting.

Not too much tat, emphasise the content.

Ref: http://www.generaldynamics.uk.com/
A site I worked on that made it very easy to navigate everywhere.

Good content beats snazzy presentation 9/10. And search engines love content.

[fried-chicken.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain about keeping them there once they hit the site but obviously there are a lot of tweaks that you can make to the actually code which make a site more friendly to Spiders which in turn mean you tend to consistantly hit higher up the charts on the search engine results.

There are a couple of good articles I can try and dig out for you if I can find.

[(Anonymous)]

Badgers.

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

Definitaly have a list of related artciles they might find interesting? Like the BBC news website does on the right hand side!! It keeps me clicking around anyway :) You can have the best content ever but people have to a). know it exists and b). find it!

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

*I definitely cannot spell and need to go to sleep... :)

[elbly.livejournal.com]

I second this.

I'd also be happy to hang about and click away if I was to be given a free cup of coffee. Maybe you could rig your website to send subliminal messages to my colleagues - get them to make me more hot drinks...

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

Thirded (and the coffee would be nice too).

Anything that gives me a bunch of random interesting looking stuff to click around will keep me occupied for a lot longer.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I know my SEO - we're consistently first or second on google and msn on relevant searches. I just hadn't realised just how much traffic this was generating us...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

As above, I know my Search engines - we're consistently first or second on google and msn on relevant searches. I just hadn't realised just how much traffic this was generating us...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Related articles I htink may be a way to go. I think I know how to do this as well...

[hardwired.livejournal.com]

Turning Visits into Commerce is one of the hardest things to do.

Since the articles might be "deep linked" then you really need some very good navigation:
Breadcrumbs, Menus, Sidebars.

The GD site (They let us ride in Tanks when we visited them!) has all three and makes it bloody easy to get to anywhere else in the Site. Means the use isn't lost, there is some imagery, but not too much unless they are looking for it, and various hotlinks to relevant documents.

if you pop me a link to the site i can give some pointers if you want

jason (dot) walter (at) gmail (dot) come

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I agree.

It's the way Wikipedia draws people in... you start off looking for something on the Enigma Machine, and two hours later you're pondering picking up a few history books about the Tudor dynasty.

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

RSS feed. Seriously.

I don't pay attention to sites without them.

[kcontheroad.livejournal.com]

A game. Seriously. Devise some silly game that tells about your product or service. Figure out how people will navigate the horrible world without your product and show how what you do makes it easier. It's really silly, but if you make me laugh and enjoy myself, I'll stick around and learn more about you. Even if it's tic-tac-toe or whatever.

[jonnyargles.livejournal.com]

Blog! You're a really good and charismatic writer, despite other unpleasant personal failings, so maybe you should turn some of that talent to your industry. Add a few industry titbits and press releases, too - don't try to make it a myspace page; people want you to be professional, authoritative and non-pushy.

Otherwise, nick as much open source as you can from reputable search engines and mashups with things like Google and Google Maps.

I take it you've got your comparison figures from alexa/alexaholic, right?

[jonnyargles.livejournal.com]

oh, and if you're looking for Usability, you could do worse than look at some of Jakob Nielsen's stuff.

http://www.useit.com/

Most important thing for me, though - No PDFs unless they're actually intended to be printed.

[the-mendicant.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't moles be better?

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

good, accurate content. one of the things that frustrates me the most during work searches is when google makes it look like the info is there, and then it isn't.

also, my marketing prof said that people tend to spend 17 seconds or less on any given page, so good content is king.

[(Anonymous)]

How do you know about David's unpleasant personal failings? You don't share a flat with him.

H

[(Anonymous)]

How?

Tiggers, maybe.

[zenmeisterin.livejournal.com]

Really, really good links both internal to other pages on the site and to external related sites. Ensure that the information is intuitively laid out as well. Short attention spans + having to click through 15 different pages to find out something that should be on the 'Contacts' page = annoyed user who will look elsewhere. Sounds like common sense but you'd be amazed at some of the sites for allegedly professional parties you can find that hide all the stuff people *want* to know in the arse end of a directory somewhere that can only be accessed by following a very specific 7 or 8 link sequence...