How To Keep Visitors Coming Back

I wanted to comment on an area that many new webmasters often ask about: How do I keep my users coming back? This is a key attribute of many successful sites. Building your repeat visitors helps grow you site naturally over time. It also helps reduce your dependency on search engines.

Fresh content is one of the main drivers for folks to come back to a site. As a starting point, I recommend taking a good look at your homepage. Each day when you visit, do you instantly see if new content is available? Are the more active sections of your site highly visible?

As a general rule of thumb, I recommend integrating more of the "new" content into your homepage. When a user first visits, you never want to give the impression there was not much going on. Try integrating related latest news on the homepage using an authoritative RSS feed. Perhaps you could also integrate the latest comments/posts from your forum section into the homepage. Do users register on your site? You can add a box that shows the latest registered users with links to their profiles. Focus on any sections of your site that seem to get the most activity, and bring those dyanmics to the homepage.

Once your site has a steady flow of new content, you will want to add the ability for users to subscribe to your content. This is done with RSS feeds. Most blog tools have this built in already. If you are running your own site/script, you can find countless free scripts/services on the web for creating your own feeds.

Make it easy for visitors (and return visitors) to see/find new content, and they will be more likely to return.