2 Essential Visitor Management Tools

September 21st, 2007 — Shrewdy

Visitor management is crucial to all but the unfriendliest of business websites.

It’s no use putting on a friendly face, and hoping that your visitors will be happy - you have to work to keep them happy.

Visitor satisfaction must run through all aspects of your website. Much is commonsense:

Encourage customer feedback
Prompt response to feedback
Clear site policies
Consistent navigation

Most of all, you have to overdeliver in every department. There are a couple of essential tools which I have added to my WordPress Installation pack.

Getting Visitors

I’ve mentioned TailHitter before. With a few server moves and reconfigurations coming up, I’ve gone ahead and installed it today. Very simple, and the HitTail code works fine. One thing to watch - WP-Cache will still be holding pages without the HitTail code. Normally this will not matter, but if you want to test the search results on HitTail, disable the cache first - or at least view the source before you test to make sure the HitTail code is at the bottom of the page.

Obviously the TailHitter plugin is not absolutely vital, as you can easily paste the code into your footer.php. But then you run the risk of losing HitTail when you change themes. And HitTail certainly is essential, especially as part of my marketing tool trio.

Keeping Visitors

No NoFollow - Stop Spam, Not Blogs When you’ve gone to all that trouble to attract visitors, what is the point of being rude to them? One bad feature of WordPress is the way it adds the nofollow tag to links in comments. I won’t bore you by discussing the pros and cons of no follow, chiefly because their are no pros.

Suffice to say, that DoFollow is an essential part of your visitor management system. Let the good guys have their say and recognize their contribution with a fair link that search engines will follow. You can easily blacklist the bad guys with Akismet, and help us all in the process.

dofollow