As web site owners, we try our best to keep our visitors surfing our sites as long as possible. We do out best to keep them busy on our sites; however, we give them countless opportunities to leave our sites without even knowing.

Ads Don’t Help
Majority of the blogsphere has Google AdSense ads embedded to their blogs. By having these ads everywhere on your site, especially with the main content we give our readers the opportunity to leave. It just doesn’t stop with Google ads, it really has to do with all types of ads, but Google’s ads are the most common way bloggers allow their users to leave.

Don’t link out too much. Let’s say if I wanted to link to Google.com and I don’t want my readers to leave; therefore, I would give the address out but I didn’t place the hyperlink on it. Readers are less likely to go to whatever address you gave them if you don’t link out. Instead, just write out the address like Google.com. I already showed the address of the external link and most readers will not take the effort to copy and paste the address to check out the external site unless they were very interested in it.

For example, if you were in a room with 20 doors all around the room, then you will most likely walk out through one of those doors. However, the chances of you walking out from the room will decrease if you had only one door.
Careful with Links
When writing a post about an article or referring to another site, just link out one time to that source. If you link out more than once to that site then it’ll be a hint to your readers to actually go there instead of staying at your site. I did a case study a while back and I learned that it’s better to have three or less different external links within one post.

Also, when it comes to links on other areas of your site make sure majority of your links are internal, as in they point to pages within your site.

Link Smart
When trying to keep readers within your site, work on keeping your external links to no more than five in a page. I’m not saying to not to link out at all, because by not doing so it’s also bad for your site. You want a trail for the search engine bots to follow such as connecting different sites in the same area when it comes to topics and keywords. If you’re going to link out then make sure wherever you link to, relates to the content of your site.

So, do you guys agree or not?

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