An essential element of the success of any Internet Marketing campaign is the ability to not only generate traffic to your Website, but capturing the interest of the visitor once he's on your site. The are a number of techniques that the best Internet Marketing Strategies employ to ensure that their Website Design encourages a user to linger.

To a great degree all Internet marketing strategies - article
marketing, blogging, search engine optimization and email
marketing, depend on the quality of your Website design to
close the sale.

As you design and continually refine your Website, maintain
constant focus on what you are trying to accomplish, what
message you are trying to communicate. All the principles
in the world are worthless without vigilance to your ultimate
objective.

Here are five fundamental rules of thumb to observe to make sure your Website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to
ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable Website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward
navigation menu so that even a young child will know how
to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus
or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't
know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "I'm outta here"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site,
reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

If you analyze every aspect of your Website Design and ask the question - 'does this contribute to my ultimate objective?' - you're Website should evolve into a significant contributor for your Internet Marketing efforts.