You have spent a countless amount of hours working on your site and the last thing you want to do is steer visitors away. Make sure that all links, ads and images leading away from your site open in a new window. By doing this it makes the site visitors come back and have to consciously make the decision to leave your site.
Why I like this personally as a reader…
When I go to a site and click on a link that opens up on the same page instead of in a new window I, more often than not, wind up not going back to the original site I started at. This will especially happen if I get hooked into what I’m reading about and have to click through several pages. When I’m done reading the extra pages I normally wind up closing out the window. If I remember to, I will type in the original site address and start over. Other times I just don’t feel like going through the hassle of starting over, so I don’t. This means the original site I started out at just lost me – not forever, but for that time.
When I go to a site that allows me to click on a link that opens up a separate window, I always get back to the original site. The original site is left open. You only have to close out the extra window. I go right back to what I was originally doing because it’s still right there in my face.
Below are two very popular services that I use. Both services create links that bring visitors to their sites. Well, that’s not what I want. I don’t want my visitors to leave. Here are examples of how I have made these services work for what I want.
Vimeo.com
I use Vimeo to showcase my videos. They offer both free and paid accounts. The paid account which is $59.95 per year, allows me to remove their branding. Besides the removal of their logo the paid account allows me to turn off the options for comments and favorites, both of which would bring my visitors to their site.
Vimeo has a great widget that would allow me to showcase my videos with tiny thumbnails on my blog. Although it’s a great feature it has a flaw, it would take my visitors away from my site. Instead I have created something similar by adding thumbnail images of my videos in the middle of my site. I then take those images and link each one to the appropriate blog post.
Flickr.com
To showcase my pictures I use Flickr. There are tons and tons of widgets/plug-ins for Flickr. If I would have used the plug-in that they provided it would have brought my visitors to their site to view my images. Instead I did a lot of research and found a plug-in that will embed all of the images on my site. Here is that link. Of course it opens in a new window.
Great points made. I always use the target=_blank on my links. The only problem I’ve run into the last couple of days is I’m testing out in-text contextual advertising. I made the links stand out in the beginning, but then blended them in a couple days later to test revenue. Along with annoying readers (maybe?), I might also be driving away traffic from articles I spent a lot of time writing.
Have to see how it all pans out. Additional revenue online is needed
I never heard of the Vimeo branding removal. Really cool… have to check that out for sure.
I understand about the contextual advertising. I don’t like the way they look and don’t like that they don’t open in a new window.
What I do instead is pick a handful of products and make those links of my own. Example would be the word hosting or host. Every time those words are used I will put in my affiliate link for hostgator. One I’ll make more money and two I control how it shows.
They even have a plug-in that will do this very thing for you automatically. It does cost $97 though so I save the money and do it manually. Maybe if it was $47 I’d use it
I absolutely don’t share your point of view:
There are +10 years it’s well known “user friendly” sites don’t automaticaly open links in a new window. In fact it’s very annoying, and myself I don’t use to browse such sites nor to return, and I am not alone.
The user can use the contextual memnu to open a link in a new window but you must not force to open windows…
In the past I used to say, if Google, Yahoo, … don’t use such practices then probably it’s because it’s not the better way to proceed. That’s also the case with links opening in new window.
To finish I will add that popup blockers use to even block links opening in a new window by a user click when the computer is running for many hours and that it’s starting to be short in free RAM.
I respect your opinion Francois. Your comment is the first of it’s kind. I have yet to receive a complaint or comment about my linking habits
I have added the below to my post as well.
Why I like this personally as a reader…
When I go to a site and click on a link that opens up on the same page instead of in a new window I, more often than not, wind up not going back to the original site I started at. This will especially happen if I get hooked into what I’m reading about and have to click through several pages. When I’m done reading the extra pages I normally wind up closing out the window. If I remember to, I will type in the original site address and start over. Other times I just don’t feel like going through the hassle of starting over, so I don’t. This means the original site I started out at just lost me – not forever, but for that time.
When I go to a site that allows me to click on a link that opens up a separate window, I always get back to the original site. The original site is left open. You only have to close out the extra window. I go right back to what I was originally doing because it’s still right there in my face.
So for me, I prefer new sites and links opening in a new window.
Vimeo is going down the tubes. Viddler is hot right now and the preferred choice of people like Gary Vaynerchuk and iJustine among many others.
What do you mean down the tubes?
I think the quality is amazing and I’m very happy with the interface.
Its funny to see the difference between a site that opens a lot of links on the same window and my other sites. While the site that opens a lot of links on the same window recieves good traffic, the vistiors dont spend much time on it.
Again great factor to point out Patrick!
“So for me, I prefer new sites and links opening in a new window.”
I agree. One of the characteristics of a good article is that often it will have many different links to good quality content that the reader will want to look at.
IMO it is annoying to click on a link and have it open in the same window because then I have to hit the back button to finish reading the oroginal article if I even remember to do that (let alone remember if the 2nd article links off to a 3rd article and so on and so forth).
I will often just hold down the Ctrl key when I click on a link so that the link will open in a new tab in FF rather than wait and see if the site owner put a target=”_blank” in there for me.
I usually tend to right-click and open in new window all the time.