All webmasters work days and nights to get highly targeted traffic to their websites. But, it is a pain to lose those hard-earned visitors. There are some specific reasons why a person would leave a website. The following list is compiled out of my own experience. There are the top reasons why i don't visit certain websites. Here i would use my Free Webmaster Resources website Templora for example.
1) Not Good Navigation
Not everyone visits your website directly by typing the URL in the address bar unless you are Google.com or Yahoo.com. So, many visitors come through search engines. So, it would be a very good idea to identify these pages by using softwares like AWStats (i use it) etc.. and make those pages as much User-Friendly as possible. Place prominent links to your homepage etc..
On my website, the Basic PHP Security Tutorial page and the SMF Theme Generator receive the most hits from Search engines and those are very much user friendly.
2) Lack of Content
This is something that everybody knows. Content is the king of everything. If there is no content on the Web, Google and Yahoo will have to shut down :D. Even a single great article can bring you in a lot of backlinks and a lot of traffic from Search Engines. But thats not going to retain your visitors. You'll have to have some more good or average content. When i started my website, Basic PHP Security Tutorial was my only good content and was the only source of traffic. So, even though i had a lot of traffic, i was not having much returning visitors. But, after that, as i improved content by writing more articles and tutorials, i started to have some loyal users.
You can also link to related content on every page so that you can get your visitors to stay longer. If you use Wordpress, you can install the Related Posts plugin (there are others available too. But many don't work well).
3) Too Many Ads
No one likes to visit websites filled up with lots of Ads. Even if you have high quality content, if you have more than 5 Ads or even 2-3 Flashing ads, people might consider your website as a "Made For Ads"(MFA)(!) website. This is really dangerous as the users might permanently abandon your website, as i have done many websites. Again, if you take my website Templora.com as an example, i have a 468 x 60 block at the top and a 728 x 90 at the bottom. Those are not annoying and i earn sufficiently from them. I could have easily inserted a few more Square adsense blocks on my Tutorials and Articles pages, but that would definitely drive the visitors away.
4) No Activity
If you have a forum or some other type of user-generated content, User Activity can harm you very well. No one wants to post in a empty forum, though they know that everything has to be empty before it can start brimming. This is really irritating ,but thats how people are. They just want to go the way the crowd goes. This is the case with blogs too. It affects blogs in an indirect way. If you display low numbers on your RSS Subscribers widget, you are prone to losing a lot of new users. I covered it in my "5 Tips to Increase RSS Subscirbers". Also, people judge your blog depending on the number of comments you have and the way you have responded.
5) Bad Design
This is not really an important factor. But, thats just for websites that provide very good content like Boing Boing. It is one of the most poorly designed blogs that i have ever seen, but it sits right on the #1 spot for the Most Favorited blogs and #2 spot of Technorati's top 100 blogs. But, every blog cannot be Boing Boing. So, you'd have to have a really good design. If you don't, you can hire me to design one for you. I'm a pretty good web designer ;).
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