Next and Previous Buttons

Have you ever gone to a website and found it frustrating and hard to navigate? 

Would we be wrong in assuming that you left the website much sooner and having viewed less pages than if the navigation was easy to use (Such as our buttons running down both sides of the website).  But what if the website made it even easier than that.  What if the website actually put next and previous buttons at the top of every page and you could just click Next, Next, Next...

Next and Previous Buttons

We have done testing and found that Next and Previous do three things.  The first is that they get people to visit more pages of your website.  The second is they get people to spend more time on your website.  The third thing they do is raise your rankings in Google.

We're guessing you understand the first two items above, but the third one probably doesn't make much sense.  How could having next and previous buttons on your website ever possibly raise your websites rankings?  We'll let you in on a little secret that most of the other website companies either don't know or don't seem to pay much attention to.  When you visit Google it puts a little tracking program (cookie) on your computer.  Using this program Google can now monitor what you do when you visit various websites.

For instance you go to one website where you only visit one page and leave in under ten seconds.  Google assumes you did not like that website.  Then you go to another one, hit Next, Next, Next and visit ten pages and are on the website for about two minutes.  Google then compares your actions on the two websites and decides you like the second website better than the first.  And so Google moves the second website higher in it's recommendations (rankings) and the first one down.

In fact, we consider our Next and Previous buttons kind of like our secret weapon.  After all, 90% of the websites in the world don't use them which makes it a lot easier for us to kick the competitions butts in the search engines.

Tested and Proven

We tested a website without next and previous buttons for a couple months.  On average people went to 3 pages on the website and stayed about a minute.  Then we added next and previous buttons.  Visitors started staying long and visiting more pages (5 pages each and about two minutes).  And then the website moved up to number one in Google.

But we did not stop there.  We took the next and previous back off again. People started going to less pages, staying less time and the website dropped to number 7 in the search engines.  We put the next and previous buttons back on and a few months later the website was back to number one again.

If your website person does not suggest adding next and previous buttons to all the pages on your website... We suggest hiring someone else!

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