Having an understanding of the type of people who visit your site is imperative your site’s success because you can gain information and use it to enhance your site to suit them. This process will encourage loyalty to your visitors, giving you assurance that they will come back again and again for more.

What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.

Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this approach, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.

When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they older or younger people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.

Trying on a conversational approach in your sites in moderation will more likely create a sense that your visitors are on common ground with you, enabling trust to be built in the relationship between you and your audience, which will come in handy when it is time to market a product to them.

A key part of increased traffic in successful websites is attributed to returning visitors. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because these frequent site visits mean only one thing- they are putting their trust in your website. There is no credibility issue there; hence, visitors keep coming back to your site, and this can easily be achieved by the following methods:

1) Incorporate a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a discussion board or forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of which are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day, as though meeting up with friends to share some ideas.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Make use of polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested in participating and to finding out about the results.

4) Hold contests

Just imagine how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide an interesting contest. Winning some sort of small comntests gives people a feeling of accomplishment, which is nice, and this will make them want to visit your site more to participate.

5) Keep your content fresh

No one gets excited reading about old news. Updating your site frequently with fresh content will ensure that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most celebrated and most successful method of attracting returning visitors; however this is also the most commonly neglected because it usually takes the backseat in a busy webmaster’s schedule. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same after some considerable time, so keep your site updated with fresh bites! You are sure to see your visitors coming back to check you out.