Improving Click Through Rates
What is click through?
Click through or click popularity is the number of times your web site gets a click when it is displayed in the results of the search engines. It also depends on how much time the visitors, coming to your site from the search results, spend on your web site.
Now a days, many crawler based search engines as well as human edited directories seem to use the concept of click popularity within their ranking algorithm.
Direct Hit considers click popularity to be the dominating factor while determining the ranking of a web site. In Direct Hit, the success of your site depends, on how many clicks your web site attracts and how long they spend on your web site. Apart from DirectHit, Excite, Hotbot and Yahoo! also use click popularity as an important factor in their ranking algorithm. This makes improving your click through an important step of your search engine optimization plan.
The objective behind the concept of click popularity is to determine which web sites are satisfying the need of the users. Two factors that determine the click popularity of a web site are:
The number of clicks it is getting from the search results of a search engine.
How long a user continues to stay in the web page (stickiness of the web page)
How to increase the click popularity of a web site?
The only way to increase the click popularity of a web site is to make the visitors spend more and more time in your web site.
As already mentioned earlier, the number of clicks that your web site gets from the search results is also an important factor. So, we have to do two things, one is to make sure that more and more visitors click on your web site in the search engine results and to make them stay.
How to make the visitors click on your web site?
Writing killer title tags
Title tags of the html page appear in the search results for the crawler based search engines, making it even more important.
If you can make your title more attractive than the web sites, which are above your site in the search results, visitor may click on your site simply due to the effectiveness of title tag.
Using powerful words in your title tag will draw the user into your site. You may sometimes try the power of questions when creating title tags. When you ask a question, you force the reader to stop and mentally answer that question, which boosts the visitor to click on your web site to visit it.
Treat this tag as if it is an advertisement for your online business. Make them short, smart, and easy to read.
Make the title easier to read for the visitor. Begin the title with a capital letter, and then follow with all lower case letters.
Use your most important keywords toward the beginning of your title tag, but use it in a way that will draw traffic. Position the title tag as the first tag on your page. Write it in a way that makes the user believe that the site will solve a problem.
Remember that a well- written and effective title can make up for a lower search engine ranking. Spend a lot of time on your title tag, and it will ultimately pay off for you in traffic to your site.
Writing attractive descriptions
Because this tag serves two purposes – high search engine rankings as well as it serves as marketing tool along. It should definitely utilize the important keywords for the page, yet it should also be written in such a way that it will fascinate people to click on the link and visit your site.
The search engines do not give this tag much importance these days. But some search engines do read the words in this tag, and therefore it is important to get some keywords into it. They give more weight to the first words that appear high in the html page rather than the words, which appear later. So placing the most important keyword within this tag will definitely help.
But, do not forget that apart from search engine ranking it solves some marketing purposes as well, so just do not stuff this tag with series of keywords. The trick is to include some keywords in such a way as well as it should contain attractive marketing content.
How to make the visitors stay
The only ethical way to influence the click popularity of a web site is to design a site, which looks attractive and offers content rich text. If the content of the site offers valuable information related to the search query, visitors will stick around and spend more time in your web site once they have arrived to it. A good content will always help you to retain visitors to your site.
Author: SearchEngineEthics.com
