Conversion: Make Your Links Work Harder

In my experience as a consultant and coach to a lot of hard-working people, one of the most common issues is the poor use of internal links. There's one thing you can do today that will improve your web site's profitability - make your links work harder.

Since I'm trying to give you ideas that you can act on quickly, with immediate results, I will start with the one thing that has proven to be worthwhile time and time again. This is by no means the only thing you can do to get more out of your internal links, but it is by far the easiest to implement, and we've never failed to improve results by doing it.

Here it is, the big idea: If you want visitors to click on a link, then you want the link to appear blue, and underlined. That's not even a link, but I bet most readers either moused over it, or tried to click on it.

If you have used a stylesheet or other methods to change the appearance of the links on your web pages, so that they are no longer blue and underlined, you are probably losing a lot of visitors in the process.

Sometimes, it's okay to make links look different - maybe you don't really think the links to your privacy policy, terms of service, etc. are that important. Maybe you have a drop-down menu or Explorer-style tree navigation system, that is easy enough to use. Fine. Your decision, but you might want to test* whether standard-issue links perform better.

But if you have links within the actual body copy of a web page, the only way that you can expect visitors to see your links and click on them is if they actually look like a link. Anything else is folly. Sorry, web design "artistes," but it's a fact. It's been shown time and again in eye-tracking studies that the visitor's eye is drawn to blue underlined links.

*How to test the results:
If you are using an analytics package like Clicktracks, Google Analytics, or Indextools, you can prove that blue links work better by looking for an increase in the number of people clicking on links. With Clicktracks, this is very easy to see visually, but any analytics application should allow you to measure the average page views per visitor.

Why is this such an important statistic? Based on my experience, with thousands of website tests, just about everything we've done that improved our overall conversion rate also increased the average number of page views per visitor. After seeing this play out time and time again, I realized that I could get a good idea of whether a change was helping simply by watching the page views.

So go ahead, check your stats, and write down the average page views per visitor from the last week. Then go make your links blue, and check again in a week. Did the number rise? Did it fall? Do you have enough visitors to make a week long test meaningful? If you have fewer than 1000 unique visitors per week, you will want to look at 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or more.

If you aren't using any kind of analytics program today, and you can't tell how many pages your average visitor is seeing, then you have a bigger problem. I will address that tremendous calamity in my next post, on Monday April 10 if not sooner.

One of these days, I'll also talk about another important factor in making your links work harder - using the right words in the text of the link. Like many things I'll talk about, this affects usability and conversion as well as search engine positioning.

How You Can Help: Folks, I do this stuff because I want to help people... but I do have to make a living too. You can help me out by telling your friends about this blog, my newsletter, and my training and coaching programs. If someone you know is lost in the search engine marketing wilderness, don't leave them hanging, send 'em here to get some help.