Usability

As a search marketer, one of my goals is to engage visitors and keep them engaged. I want searchers to find my sites, spend time reading content, click around, go deeper in the site, exhibit certain behaviors and convert.

Two key performance metrics I rely on to measure visitor engagement are bounce rates and page views. Having a site with a high bounce rate and a low page views indicates a negative user experience –a sign there’s something wrong with the website. Factors that contribute to high bouncing and low views range from poor content, to slow load times, to confusing site architecture, to a lack of proper visual cues.

Yet another culprit may be a shortage of inline links: in-sentence or in-paragraph, contextual hyperlinks.

In the next section, I’m going to discuss how aggressive internal linking can raise your visitor engagement.