An essential element of the success of any Internet Marketing

campaign is the ability to not only generate traffic to your

Website, but capturing the interest of the visitor once he's

on your site. The are a number of techniques that the best

Internet Marketing Strategies employ to ensure that their

Website Design encourages a user to linger.

To a great degree all Internet marketing strategies - article

marketing, blogging, search engine optimization and email

marketing, depend on the quality of your Website design to

close the sale.

As you design and continually refine your Website, maintain

constant focus on what you are trying to accomplish, what

message you are trying to communicate. All the principles

in the world are worthless without vigilance to your ultimate

objective.

Here are five fundamental rules of thumb to observe to make

sure your Website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at

a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with

words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they

are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not

let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button!

Give them the value of your site up front without the splash

page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to

ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable

Website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content

and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let

your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being

pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward

navigation menu so that even a young child will know how

to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus

or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't

know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you

will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are

in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant

information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't

confuse your visitors because confusion means "I'm outta here"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site,

reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not

annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If

you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control

over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

If you analyze every aspect of your Website Design and ask the

question - 'does this contribute to my ultimate objective?' -

you're Website should evolve into a significant contributor for

your Internet Marketing efforts.

Article written by Michael Saunders.