30 Ways to Lose Visitors to your Website

All website owners would like to attract visitors and some websites are better in attracting visitors than others due to a long list of reasons. Knowing how to attract visitors and keeping them returning is a never ending and changing challenge. Search engines and visitors change their search patterns and all website owners require to keep up to date in running an effective successful website.

Having a purpose for your website and good timely goals is vital to help you achieve your targets that you have set. Business, non profit, government and personal websites owners require taking into consideration many factors when running a website to attract visitors that they wish.

My personal website is not a business, no sales or advertising. The goal is to build a property/real estate website for worldwide users to search for property, list property for sale & rent & free property advertising. In addition I continue to add unique content building up the resource of property information, and I hope to have hundreds of pages that are useful for visitors worldwide. Building good link partners with other real estate and related websites is also a major goal.

As website owners we are attempting to retain the visitors we have at present and build on the amount of visitors to our website. The following short list of what we should not be doing is a reminder for all website owners trying to attract visitors to their website. 30 points are written in non technical language for all of use to understand, and of course the list is not exhaustive.

1. Find your website: Web searchers and surfers require locating your website and that means making it easier for search engines to rank you higher.
2. Website is down: Server error, unpaid hosting fee, or another technical fault means no person can visit your website.

3. Met tag description: Clicking on a link description for a page that has no relevance to the content.

4. Out of date product and services: Visitors will stop coming if you do not have up to date items on your website.

5. Lose of valuable partners or website link partners: Retaining quality website links with other websites could drive traffic to your website. Banned website urls hosted on your website can cause your website to be penalised in a number of ways from search engines, thus lowering visitor numbers.

6. Not approving content added by visitors, slow responding or no response to emails from visitors and customers.

7. Not adding fresh content for several months will drive away many visitors and search engine placement will be affected.

8. Banned from all search engines through unethical practices or doing something with your website that is totally not allowed.

9. No sitemap: With no sitemap it makes it more difficult for spiders to crawl your web pages and as a result your content will be crawled less often.

10. Slow and difficult to load pages: Website visitors will not stay long and try to access a website that is very slow to load.

11. Viruses or Trojan that get transferred to a website visitor’s computer as a result of accessing your website.

12. Duplicate content that is on other pages of your website or you have the same or very similar content to a number of other websites.

13. Repeatedly sending out emails of special offers to website subscribers too often could affect a visitor’s decision to return or not.

14. Poor quality website design: Visitors tend to return to a website and stay on longer if they feel comfortable finding information or using the website easily.

15. Meta tags that don’t match your key words, or indeed no meta tags or keywords at all. Result will be that your ability to rank highly in major search engines will be severely affected.

16. Description of your website that matches your content and keywords require to be a close match or once again your search engine placement will affected.

17. Keyword and phrases use that are uncompetitive and very few, if any, people search for.

18. Spelling and grammar mistakes: Depending on the type of visitors you wish to attract well written content is most often important.

19. Websites full of advertising with no real valuable content for visitors.

20. Poor optimised website or the website has not been optimised to attract visitors you wish for certain products and services, result your website will not in general show up for your key target visitor market.

21. Purpose of the website: With no plan, strategy, and how you are going to achieve the websites goals does not help with overall website performance and attracting visitors.

22. Content on your website that is misleading or not accurate.

23. Not actually knowing what to do to attract and keep visitors.

24. Visitor contribution: Hosting a forum, visitors submitting articles or news stories. Suddenly stopping this type of visitor interaction could impact on overall visitor numbers and the time they spend on your website.

25. Service or items that do not met expectations. Selling items on line should come with an accurate description and the service should also be good to attract repeat customers, and hence repeat visitors to your website.

26. Offline Activities: Losing the ability to provide a certain service, product or advertising as a result of a company’s action or website user losing a vital contract could obviously decrease visitor numbers to your website, especially when that product or service is your main visitor attraction.

27. Dead links. Hyper links that say page not found or the link on the website goes nowhere when pressing on a hyper link will affect the spider crawling your website, and visitor experience.

28. Reducing or stopping advertising on and offline that may have been a result of the majority of your visitor traffic.

29. No title or keywords in the header of your website will result in lower search engine visibility and for key visitor target market.

30. Language of your website does not match your target market. Visitors may no understand how to use the website and the information on the website.