You want a sticky website. The longer people are on your site, the better, and you can do things to help make it sticky. In the last blog I talked about minimizing (or at least being aware of) links that pointed people away from your website, and I also recommended that you build up links that point to other parts of your site. In this blog, I will continue to give some pointers and ideas to help you create a sticky site. The ideas here are generally useful for most business and audiences, regardless of whether you use a blog or a more conventionally formatted website.

* Break up larger articles into several smaller pieces that require clicking from one page to the next to read. This gets people used to clicking around on your site, which is a good habit you want your readers to have!

* If you want your site's visitors to follow you on Twitter, use the target="blank" function to have your Twitter page open in a new tab. That way, they're still on your site and can return to it shortly after seeing your Twitter page. (Sure, they might click away, but they may still come back to your site).

* Give them a reason to stay! Offer lots of high value content. I shouldn't have to write this but I've visited enough websites with extremely low value content that I've decided to include it in my list.

* Use other types of interaction, such as chat, forms, and embedded Twitter updates to keep people communicating with you through your site. Google Gadgets is another easy way to increase the engagement on your site. There are LOTS of gadgets that you can embed to increase your audience's interest and to hang on to their eyeballs for a moment longer.

* Rather than having a downloadable pdf (like a report or ebook), just keep it at HTML and have it open in a separate page.

* Add a blog if you don't have one already. A blog is always full of fresh content and is a great way to create a sticky experience for readers.

* Get rid of those advertisements. Yes, you might want to have advertisements and they may be appropriate for your business model, but if you want a truly sticky site and you're just hoping for a bit of AdSense income as an extra bonus, drop the ads.

Obviously stickiness is not an end to itself. After all, who cares if people spend 2 minutes or 20 minutes on your site? Ultimately, it's about engaging an audience that pays attention to what you have to say, that shares it with others, and that buys from you.

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If you run Google Analytics, one of the metrics you should pay attention to is "Average time on site". This metric indicates just how sticky your site is. The longer people are on your site, the stickier it is.

The term "sticky" is a great term. Think of a sticky fly strip in which flies land and can't leave. That's the kind of site you want to create: One where your audience, prospects, and clients show up and are "stuck" to your site; they can't leave.

As a website owner, you need to figure out how to make your site sticky. I can't tell you exactly what to do because it's different for every website, every industry, and every audience demographic. However, here are some general ideas that tend to work for many situations.

The first thing you'll want to do is get the baseline. Find out what your visitor's average time on site has been and write it down somewhere. If you are serious about creating a website that builds a loyal audience, you'll want to measure this metric. (The maxim "what gets measured gets managed" is very true here).

Next, review how people typically look at your website. You might be able to tell this from Google Analytics or simply from feedback you get from your customers. Do they have a natural progression (i.e. Home > About > Products > Buy Now)? Find out where people are falling off of that pathway and shore it up. For example, if people get to your products page and review your testimonials only to click to client websites, you may want to remove the hyperlinks from those testimonials.

Then, you'll want to review the rest of your website for "exits". Exits are where your readers click to another site from a link on your page. If you link generously to outside websites more than you link to other places within your own site, you could be driving people away. It's not that you shouldn't have links pointing to external sites, but you should be mindful of their placement and of their potential impact on your business.

After that, increase the number of internal links to your site: Think about using various methods to encourage people to click around your site. Use tags, labels, categories, and other similar labeling in sidebars and in content. When someone reads one piece of content tagged with something interesting, they will be more likely to follow the same tag if it is clearly available to them.

Also, use lists (commonly found in blogs but also quite realistic to use in more conventional sites) that have "latest articles", "most popular topics", "if you liked this, you might also like these", and so on. These help to drive people deeper into your site.

Tune in later this week for another post that talks more about stickiness.

Over the years that I’ve been doing online marketing, I’ve found several sites that have proven to be useful for a number of reasons. And I’ve bookmarked them. Here they are,  for your convenience. Now, instead of having a dozen or so bookmarks for yourself, you only need to bookmark this page and revisit it for all of your online marketing needs!

PRChecker.info. PageRank, named for Larry Page, is that magical Google ranking based on several mysterious variables (and you can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank). Watching your site’s PageRank and striving to improve it is a helpful way to measurable improve your site’s credibility. In theory, higher Page Rank means higher placement in searches (although that is not my personal goal with the sites that I watch PageRank on). PRChecker.info will check the PageRank of any site you type in. Very handy.

Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is the first of two Google tools I like. Using Google Webmaster Tools, I’m able to have Google diagnose my site for me and tell me any problems it has while it is crawling the site. This has been helpful in the past when a site I had wasn’t indexing properly: I used Google’s Webmaster Tools and was alerted to the problem quickly. This is also the place where you can submit a sitemap to help Google crawl your site more effectively.

Google Analytics. This is the other Google tool I like. You put a code into your web pages and Google will record every time someone clicks on your page. You can do so much with Google Analytics, like see where people are clicking from, and when. You can see what it is that they are looking at on your site and how they got to your site. You can see what pages they clicked to and from, and what pages they are leaving from. In particular, I really like the Google Analytics goals tracking where you can assign goals to different pages on your site to track people through your sales process.

SEO Toolbar. This isn’t so much a bookmark as it is a browser toolbar. I like their keyword research tool which cross references keyword information from a number of sources. They’ve got free training and competitive research – it’s a good tool to add to your browser.

Textalyser. Keywords are key in online marketing. You need to make sure that you’re highlighting the right keywords so search engines correctly list you with other relevant websites. I’m sure there are other tools out there but I’ve come to enjoy textalyser.net which is rich in information but painfully simple to use. Whenever I need to write something for a site and it needs to be keyword friendly, this is my go-to bookmark.

These are just a start. You might find more sites or you might find applications that you prefer over the ones I’ve listed here. Or, your business’ needs might be different from mine so you might need to invest in something else. But for many businesses, this list covers the basic online marketing needs they have.

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Google Analytics is a great way to monitor who is on your site, for how long, and what they do while they’re there. Yes, there are other analytics service providers out there but Google can’t be beat for free, robust data.

If you’re like most users, you add the Google Analytics code to your site and visit your Analytics account page from time to time to see who’s visiting. Lots of colorful charts and eye candy, and some helpful stuff too!

But if you’re not using one specific Google Analytics feature, you’re missing out! We’re talking about the "goals" feature.

Setting up goals helps you to track progress through your site (which you could already do, of course) but with an eye to watching specific interactions that your visitors are having on your site.

Let’s say that you want to measure how many people are clicking from your welcome page to your products page then to a specific product then through to purchase. Of course, you could just look at the stats for each page and compare it to purchases, but there is an easier way that gives you some real numbers to work with.

By creating a goal and a funnel, you tell Google what steps you want it to watch for and it measure how many people click from one to the next to the next. So you would notice if lots of people are visiting your welcome page then your products page but few people are going beyond that. (Hint: there’s a problem with your products page). By having your funnel and goals all set up you can make changes and see how traffic is impacted as a result.

Google also lets you assign a dollar value to your goal. So, let’s say that you have a 3 step funnel where people can

(1) view some information,

(2) request information, and

(3) see a thank you page. And you know that by the time people see the thank you page, they are likely to spend $100 in the next year, you can make some good estimates. If you can find a way to get more people to click "submit" when they request information, there’s a likelihood of increased revenue.

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