Use customized pages or DHTML pop-ups to keep searchers on your site longer

One of the reasons Google is such an effective site from a usability standpoint is that it's able to get users to the information they're looking for in as few clicks as possible, and with as little effort as possible. Your website should strive to do the same, whether it's reducing the user's path to a particular piece of content, or by making suggestions for content that you know a particular user will find relevant.

An idea I've been advocating for quite some time is customizing pages on your website based on the
entry path to your site. So for example, if the person comes to your site after doing a Yahoo search for "widgets", why not show them a page that says "Welcome Yahoo user! Thanks for searching for 'widgets'. Here are several links that might take you to what you're interested in." Of course the content on that page itself is usually going to be relevant to their search on widgets, but why not customize the experience and offer them more information that might help?

Back in March I stumbled upon a great example of this. Forbes serves a dynamic HTML (DHTML) pop-up for traffic that's originating from a Google search. The pop-up offers a welcome to Google users and links to several stories that are related to the user's search on Google (probably powered by Forbes' own site search). This image shows an example. I did a Google search on "logistics" and clicked the Forbes link, and here's what I saw when I reached the Forbes site.

I don't know how long Forbes has been doing this -- perhaps it's something they've been doing for a long time and I've never seen it before. But I tried it again today and it still worked, so they haven't given up on the tactic. So that leads me to believe it's effective at extending the visit length of site users, since I'd imagine they would have discontinued the practice by now if it wasn't.

You could easily implement this practice for traffic that's originating from other major sources -- perhaps a partner's website, someone who links to you and drives a lot of traffic, other search engines or directories, etc. Forbes is doing the same thing for Yahoo search traffic, and possibly others as well.