If you’ve got a business and have a website for it, you need targeted traffic to come to your website and stay long enough to see what you have to offer if you want to be successful. And, those visitors should also take action based upon what they see and what you want them to do.

It’s a simple fact that the more time a prospective customer spends on your website, the more likely it is that he or she will take some sort of action specific to what you want to happen. A good way to ensure that this is going to happen is to encourage visitors to keep “clicking through” your website’s pages. Here are four simple ways to increase page views and thus, the success of your business.

1. Fill your site with relevant, unique, well written content: People are hungry for good quality relevant information and that is one of their key motives for surfing the Internet. If your site delivers the information they need, they will be more than willing to return to it and possibly even recommend it to others. Your content will also get picked up by the search engines, so people will keep on visiting it and your page views will dramatically increase.

2. Keep It Simple, Silly. Most of us have heard this phrase (KISS for short), but it especially applies to writing for the Web. If you have a difficult time writing short copy, take some time to train yourself to do just that.

It’s been proven time and again that basically, people who surf the Web have relatively short attention spans. Therefore, Internet writing has to be shorter than print writing because people tend to scan content instead of actually reading it as they might in a print article.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t present an excellent, several thousand words-long article, but it DOES mean you probably should break it up into smaller installments that people can read in short increments. This also helps you with “click through” rates (which also helps you with search engine ranking), because having people go to the “next section” at the bottom of each short section by strategically placing a link there is only going to encourage them to stay and keep reading — and keep clicking through, too.

3. Use proper highlighting and formatting: The style and appearance is very important. If your website looks dull, with great chunks of hard-to-digest text, people will surf out as quickly as they surfed in.

One good way to break up your content is to highlight key words and phrases. And, use plenty of space in between your text. It gives the eyes a rest of sorts and also helps people scan the content, which is a common habit of website readers. Break up longer articles into pages that deal with different sections of your theme and invite the visitor to view more by posting a link at the bottom of each section.

4. Put a site map and some article “teasers″ on your first page to encourage people to click through to each “teaser’s″ article and read more. (Site maps are also good for spiders as they crawl your pages, which in turn can increase your rankings with search engines.)

With these four easy steps, it should be easy to get people to come to your site — and stay. This will not only get you more page views, but it will also get you more targeted traffic, which in turn is only good for your business.

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