Page 10 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 10.02

CMDNleiaiccskketinIiAnsgnaTdYthioNeouonTrisrsWicyekb: Click.

10 PAYOUTMAGAZINE First of all, let’s just assume here that you
have rock-solid, top-down menu and
navigation structure and move on from there;
that if you have flashy, scripty links across the
top for prettiness, those links are replicated
elsewhere in the basic page format with text,
etc. and so on and so forth. This is just one of
the basic tenets, and subject for another article
altogether, m’kay?

What we want to talk about here are
filaments and trails weaving and veining through
your site like tunnels in an ant colony or the
roots of a thousand year-old oak.

Looking at a site page, we as simple humans
may not see these paths down under the
surface, but search engines can. Or, rather, they
can “hear” them.

Because while search engine “eyes” can
see and crawl each link in a site, this doesn’t
lead SEs to know how busy your site may be.
How much people click your links. What they
do do is “hear” with their “ears” the frequency
and practical purposes of each click-down to
subsequent, relevant items hyperlinks lead to.

Click click.

Believe it or not, search engines (saying this,
we all understand which is The One SE) hear
every link that is clicked on your site. Visitor
activity isn’t measured by how much time each
visitor spends on a page; a user could start
reading an article, then leave the computer
to answer their phone, go to the bathroom, or
watch a movie.

Visitor activity is truly best measured by how
long users remain on your domain, which is most
accurately determined by how much they click
here, there and everywhere within your site.

And how is this done? Simply said, by
making your site noisy with activity by adding
links.

More complicatedly, though, is to breakup
your site and pages into smaller, more quickly
readable and necessarily clickable destinations
for the reader.

This is NOT to say everything must be click-
bait (although they have a pretty good notion