How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favorites

If you want your visitors to come back again and again, you've got to get them to add your website to their favorites (also known as bookmarks in some browsers). That's the menu where they can save websites that they want to use again, clicking them easily to get to them. Being added to a user's favorites is like getting an ad for your website right there in their browser's menu, for nothing. But how can you do it?

Make it Easy

The option to add a website to the favorites menu is quite hidden, and people don't often think about it. You'll get far more people adding you to their favorites if you offer them a quick and easy 'Add this Site to my Favorites' link somewhere towards the top of the page. Even if they don't actually use the link, it still draws attention to the browser's favorites function and makes the user think about it, increasing the likelihood of them adding the site to their favorites sooner or later.

Pay Attention to the Title

Once your site is in people's favorites, of course, it's not going to do you much good if they can't find it again later. You need to make sure that the name and purpose of your site is clearly stated in its title, as that's all they'll have to go on when they're looking through their favorites. Make it long enough to be specific, but not so long that it looks self-important or information gets lost off the end.

Tracking Who's Done It

It can be difficult to know who's coming in to your site using a favorite they saved. Usually, you would look at the referrer to see where they came from but if they type the web address or use a favorite the referrer will be blank. There's no way of telling which of those two things they did unless you send people who use your bookmark link to a special address for example www.example.com/bookmark. However, this method is not foolproof because not everyone who adds your site to their favorites will use your link to do it.

Promise Updates

If you want people to add your site to their favorites then you need to give them a reason to come back. The best way to do this is to make it clear exactly how often your website is updated. You might write at the top of your website 'updated weekly' or you might simply write the date when you last updated the website. The second way only works if you update your website often.

Could You Be Their Homepage?

Of course, if you want to go even further than just getting people to add your website to their favorites then you should consider trying to get people to make your website their homepage. That is, the website that loads automatically when they first open their web browser and that they get back to when they click on their home button. If you can get your website as someone's homepage even for a relatively short length of time then they are likely to see your website dozens of times in a day.

So how can you get people to set your website as their homepage? It's a little more difficult than just getting them to add your site to their favorites as it works differently in different web browsers. In Internet Explorer you can give people a link that makes your website their homepage automatically. For other web browsers, however, you will need to give the visitor a set of instructions. This will require some research on your part but will generally be instructions on how to open the web browsers options or preferences menu and use the section that allows the homepage to be set manually.

Before people will make you their homepage, though, you need to offer them the kinds of things that they might want on a homepage. You can't just expect your own content to be enough, you need to give them other things too, such as local weather or a box that they can type searches into to search the whole web using a popular search engine.

How One Great George Street doubled their web traffic from ‘accessible’design

Over the space of a year, central London conference centre One Great George Street has more than doubled their web traffic from re-designing their website to make it more user friendly and DDA compliant. To gain better search engine positioning and hence increase traffic further they have also embarked on an SEO project.

Who are One Great George Street?

One Great George Street is an elegant and historic central London conference venue. Situated in the heart of Westminster the venue has 19 rooms suitable for a plethora of events, from conferences to meetings; training sessions to product launches, awards dinners to private fine dining and the venue is also available for exclusive use for weekend wedding receptions. With modern and traditional rooms and the capacity for 6-400 guests, there’s a room for every occasion.

Although a well known and established conference venue already, in 2004 it was felt that the corporate image needed to be updated to better reflect the prestigious nature of the business. So, along with a new logo and new brochures an access-friendly website was brought online in Feb 2005.

Website creation

Designed and created with the help of marketing agency WDPA (now SOUK Response) and built by E-Business (part of Thomas Telford Ltd), the new site adopted the fresh new streamlined look that can be seen on all other literature and material. As well as updating the site aesthetically, the aim was also to make it more in line with the new DDA standards. The venue is keen to offer a service for all, so that people of all abilities have easy access to the site and the facilities in the building.

Improvements and additions included an option for changing text size for sight-impaired users and a page detailing accessibility features in the building. A text version is also currently being developed to improve the accessibility. With a clear navigation system, it was made easier to work through from searching for a suitable room, to seeing virtual tours and making a booking. As wedding receptions are an increasingly valuable source of business to One Great George Street, two distinct sections were created – one for weddings and one for corporate visitors. These markets have very different requirements so it’s important to separate them to make the site more relevant for the visitor.

Search Engine Optimisation opportunities

On the SEO front, basic foundations were laid down by E-business in late 2005 with the aim of testing the waters whilst fully researching the SEO options. During the last 6 months since adding keywords, alt tags, meta tags etc, the positioning on the key search engines has increased slightly, but by working with an experienced SEO agency the aim is to get even higher visibility. Commercetuned (www.commercetuned.co.uk) are working on an ongoing project which includes adding new website coding, link building and providing recommendations on keyword positioning on the customer interface.

With search engine marketing and optimisation being such hot topics, the One Great George Street marketing strategy needs to keep up with and top of these trends and are therefore fully embracing any changes. The marketing plan has been adapted over the last two years to incorporate this more and more with all campaigns now including e-shots and web advertising as a core element and all communications are directing the client to the website.

Visitor numbers

With visitor numbers increasing so significantly, the re-designed website has been a great success. Over the last 3 months a key campaign was undertaken and a quarterly e-newsletter was distributed and the success of these can clearly be seen with visitor numbers at nearly triple what they were before the re-design. From the visitor statistics what is also very encouraging is the increase in ‘returning’ visitors. This again has doubled over the last 6 months to 28% of total visitors.

This increase in traffic is great news for the venue and is far more than expected, but there is still more that can be done to improve the awareness of this conference centre, which is why Commercetuned are now on board working on an all encompassing SEO/SEM project.