Suze Bragg

People Don't Always Enter Through Your Homepage
February 22, 2008

It's been estimated that over 60% of the traffic that enters your web site does so through an interior page; that is, they don't land on your homepage first. They find your interior pages when searching on a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, etc.) or clicking on a link found on another web site or from a banner advertisement. Regardless of how they found you, the goal is they FOUND you. Many companies, when designing their site, put the most effort on their homepage, and allow the rest to lag behind. That's like putting all your effort on your storefront, but neglecting the mechandise in the store. These interior links are called deep links.

Things to consider:

1. How many links do you have off of your homepage? Check out www.potterybarn.com and notice that they don't list everything, but instead provide links further into their site.
2. How many links do you have on your interior pages? Here is an example of an interior page.
3. How many people link to you? The easiest way to check this stat is to open Google, and type in linkto: www.yourwebsite.com. Example: linkto: www.potterybarn.com has approximately 241,000 sites linking to it (many might be multiple links from the same web site). Boyles Furniture has 96 links.
4. How many people do you link to? In Google, type in link from: www.boyles.com (obviously substitute your store name) to find out quickly.
5. What is your Google page rank? You can check yours instantly.
6. Have you searched for yourself lately? Type in your name and see what people are saying about you.
7. Do you have any broken links? Run this and fix any immediately.

Each month, set aside 10 minutes and check how well you're performing by running through the 7 steps above. It will help your search results and in return, it'll help increase your online traffic. More traffic = more $$ for you.

Posted by Suze Bragg on February 22, 2008 | Comments (0)