If you want more page views, the most obvious thing to do is get the visitors who are already coming to your site to visit more pages and stick around longer. This idea has become known as making a Web site ‘sticky’ – getting people to hang around longer and click on more pages. To do this well you need to figure out why people are coming to your site – what they are searching for when they find you. Then you need to give them more of it – or make the stuff you have easier to find.

Studies show most people begin a Web surfing session at a search engine like AltaVista or a directory like Yahoo by typing in a search phrase – usually not a single search term. People have learned that if they type in ‘drivers’ they’ll get a half million links and the top 10 will probably not be what they need. If they type in ‘CD-ROM drivers’ they’ll do a bit better. But if they type in ‘Sony CD-ROM drivers’ they’ll get much better results. Most people have figured this out by now. Some people do come to your main page on a regular basis and scroll around looking for the new stuff you’ve put up since their last visit. Most Web designers assume this and build their sites accordingly. Following this approach you should have a well thought out navigation or button bar on every page that links back to all your main sections like ‘About Us’, ‘What’s New’ and ‘Jobs’. This is all well and good and you should do it. But if you think carefully about what ‘studies’ say about surfing habits, you will be throwing away a lot of traffic unless you think a little bit more carefully about it.

This article is part of the Web Developer's Journal's Web Site Promotion Guide, a collection of articles on how to increase Web site traffic.