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Do Splash Pages Increase Website Traffic?

By: Anne Caldwell

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We've all landed on the beautiful introductory pages, nearly without text, but compensating for it with dazzling graphics and/or an animated Flash movie. Do you wonder if these splash pages will really increase your website traffic?

Web designers are visual people and that is how they relate to the world. They believe that the fantastic graphics are eye-catching and fun, enhancing your website. Any other artist, or right-brain oriented person would probably agree with that assessment. If, on your website, you're selling a course on graphic design or promoting graphics packages, perhaps there's some benefit to having one of these amazing displays immediately visible to your website visitors.

If you're not in an artistic industry, however, maybe this will help you to reconsider the value of a splash page. In fact, we will now look at the negatives.

Let's presume that a member of your target demographic actually lands on your site. He comes to see what you have to offer. Instantly, he finds himself trapped into having to watch the animation that is stopping him on his journey towards discovering what it was that he had hoped to find.

Maybe, if your animated flash movie is stunningly clever, relevant or beautiful, you might think he'd stay due to utter fascination. Certainly, a small percentage of your visitors (those with graphic inclinations) actually may wait for the animation to end. But for the remainder, facing the equivalent of a brick wall while being forced to wait for the animation to end is annoying and frustrating. This is especially true if they're still on dial-up and your flash movie is slow to load.

You know the unwritten rule of website traffic and advertising: You have less than five seconds to capture your visitor's interest and persuade him that it would be a loss if he were to cut his visit to your website short without reading your brilliant message.

Are you beginning to regret all of the money that you spent on that splash page? Though you might feel like you are getting your money's worth in glitz, the proof is in the website statistics. Check for yourself and verify how long the average visit to your splash page lasts. Seriously, I'd be stunned if it is over 10 seconds.

The fact of the matter is that, in the mind of your visitor, your splash page is holding him hostage and stopping him from finding the information that he believed that he would find. He looks for navigation buttons or a 'skip this page' escape route. If he locates the latter, you might actually be lucky enough for him to click-through. If not, he's out of there far faster than your pretty graphics can finish loading. That's the honest truth.

There's yet another reason that fancy splash pages won't be your best visitor-enticing strategy. These graphic giants are coded with JavaScript, which cannot be indexed. When it's placed at the entry of your site, search robots come up hard against it, and find themselves stopped as firmly as was your potential, and now lost, customer. Search robots don't even wait a full second, but instead abandon your site instantly, continuing on their way, leaving your site unranked and un-indexed. Why? Because they found no keywords and no unique or relevant text. There was no content at all, as far as their algorithms could compute. And if your splash page is hosted at a graphic service, on a remote site, and the search bot is rerouted to it via a redirect, it's a coin toss deciding which sin is worse: redirect or no index-able content.

Oh yes, those splash pages are flashy and amazing, but if you're thinking about adding one to increase website traffic, stop. Instead, apply the left side of your brain and do the math. The statistics should make your decision much simpler and much more practical. Skip the flash!

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

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