4 Things Visitors Look For in a Quality Site or Blog

By: Tom O'Malley

Attracting visitors to your site can be a tedious and expensive task. And if you don't give your visitors what they're looking for when they come to your site or blog, they can be gone in a flash. Of course, what your visitors will be looking for depends on the purpose of your site or blog. But there are a few universal things that visitors always look for in a quality website or blog. Read on to learn more about these key principles.

This one seems like a real no-brainer, but is actually more nuanced than it appears. It is not only that your site has to have quality content and offer relevant services, you also have to make sure that content and those services are, in every way, the main focus of your website. All too often web developers spend countless hours creating visually appealing designs for items such as the navigation bar and their logo. Make these visuals too flamboyant however and you run the risk of actually distracting from your content and annoying your visitors. Make your content the center of attention. Your visitors’ eyes should gravitate naturally toward it.

The most common transgression of this law involves placing advertisements where visitors would naturally expect to see content. This distracts and irritates visitors, while at the same time reminding them subconsciously that you are profiting from their attention. No one wants to be used in this manner, and any short-term increase in revenue that these unfortunately-placed ads may bring you will be more than offset by the lack of trust that they inspire in your visitors. Learn more about the new wave in online advertising at Rethinking Advertising (Hint: It’s Not About the Money).

Lay out your site’s structure in such a way as that its navigation is intuitive. Ideally, a visitor should be able to get to anywhere he wants to go on your site in two clicks or less. This will likely mean that you will have to provide two or more different (and sometimes redundant) ways of navigating your site or blog. Maybe you will categorize your site, and some pages will fall into two or more categories. No visitor will complain that you have given them too many ways to navigate your site. Visitors can tell when a web developer has really taken the time to think about a visitors’ path through their site and worked to make the process as simple as possible. Visitors will be grateful to you for respecting their time and not challenging their intelligence by obfuscating the navigation.

Like it or not, humans are social creatures and ultimately weigh the merits of any site or blog in part based on how others perceive and relate to it. Take Twitter for instance. When most people first heard about Twitter, they wrote it off as a novelty. A great deal of people even thought (sometimes aloud), “Are people really doing this?” But as Twitter’s user-base grew and influential celebrities started to regularly tweet, those same people found themselves checking out the site and questioning their beliefs about its merit. Eventually, many of these people signed up and are now regular users.

The Twitter example shows how every new idea is judged in the context of its social standing. There are simply many people who do not wish to be trail-blazers, who do not wish to rely on the advice or services of a new start-up or an unpopular blog. They prefer to rely on the Wisdom of the Crowd, letting others do the hard work of filtering through the new and unproven to uncover the exciting and new.

The good thing about this is that for every person like this, there is someone willing to take a chance on your start-up. Attract enough of these people and the masses will eventually come to see your merit. Learn to attract this special kind of people at Attracting Trail-Blazers: The Key to Success in the New Hyber-Connected World.

The funny thing is, the process of a visitor’s decision about whether or not your site is of any quality actually starts long before he or she lands on your site. Visitors base their judgments about the quality of a site not only on its content, layout and popularity, but also on the quality of the site or blog they came from before stumbling onto it. In other words, the quality of the referral (whether a visitor found out about your site through a close personal friend, one of his favorite news or aggregation sites, or a simple Google search) influences a visitor’s thought processes about your site. For instance, a visitor that comes to your blog from an article at the New York Times website that quotes a recipe from your Mediteranean cooking blog ( generously including a link back to your home page) is much more likely to have positive feelings towards your site than a visitor that types “Mediteranean cooking” into Google Search and happens to stumble upon your blog. In the first case, you’d have to do something seriously wrong in content or layout to get that visitor to find your site lacking in quality. In the second case however, create a hard-to-navigate site structure or bury your content, and that visitor will be gone faster than they can hit the back button.

Chances are you already work hard to get these types of quality referrals. But what are you supposed to do about those visitors that simply stumble upon your site or come from less-reputable sources? You can’t just forget about them, that would be silly. That’s why we here at See Link Run have developed a free widget that will display to all of your visitors the top incoming links, or backlinks, to your site or blog. This widget shows all of your visitors, even those who simply stumbled upon your site, the kind of quality referrals that your site enjoys, and in the process assures them of your own credibility and quality. You can even configure the widget not to display referrals that come from less-than-reputable domains or competitors. Check it out at See. Link. Run. Widgets – Display Top Incoming Links.