There has been a lot emphasis on SEO and Pay Per Click lately, but less about how to optimize sites for humans once they get to your website. It doesn?t matter how many clicks a site can get in one day if visits scramble for the back button as soon as the page loads. Sites that become successful first get visibility from search engines and then keep visitors engaged once they get there.

But how is this accomplished? This is the million dollar question and one that won't be answered by one single person, but can absolutely be answered by visitor reaction to your site. It doesn?t matter whether or not your friends or your coworkers think your site looks great. What matters is real, honest, factual data about how visitors react when they come to your site. Here are some questions to ask:

• Is the purpose of my site clear?
• Where do visitors drop off?
• Are visitors seeing what I want them to see?

Build in a Strong Call to Action

You know what you want visitors to take when they come to your site, but do they? Before you even design or redesign your site, you must ask yourself, "what is it exactly that I want visitors to do when they come to my site?" Do you want people to sign up for your newsletter so that you can build brand recognition and product awareness over time? Do you want them to download your eBook? Do you want them to pass along a link to your free report to a friend, boss, or coworker? You've got to include a call to action that specifically asks visitors to take that action.

I was speaking with a new client recently about his company's website content and asked him what exactly he wanted visitors to do when they got to his site. The company provides a new and complicated brokerage service that most people and businesses didn't realize they needed. However, the company knew from experience that when they could get the prospect to speak with a sales person, they became excited about the service and often became accounts.

My client replied that with their company?s business model, the action they needed visitors to take when they arrived at the site was to call the company. But their 800 number wasn't listed on the pages. There was no compelling argument on the site to pick up the phone and make that call. The remedy is an upcoming site redesign focused around this particular call to action through a visible phone number, live chat, and VOIP icons. Before you wonder how this company could have overlooked publishing their 800 number, take a look at your own website after determining the specific action you want your customers to take. There are always ways to improve.

Conceptualize a Visitor Path

Before you build your site, you should envisiona path through which you want customers to travel. This will depend on the overall goal of your website. Your goal might be to sell products, sell information, build an opt-in mailing list, build community, or a combination of these.

It?s not likely that any of these things will truly be achieved with one page, so you will need to create multiple pages to build desire for and reinforce your intended goal. If visitors never take the first step down your path then your site surely won?t reach its intended goal.

For example, your first thought may be to lower your prices if visitors aren?t buying, but it could be that visitors are never getting past the home page. Until you know how customers travel through your site, you may apply the wrong cure based on your perceived diagnosis, and selling yourself short on your profits at the same time.

The first step in developing a successful visitor path is to understand where visitors go and where they leave. Without this critical piece of information you may apply the wrong cure based on your perceived diagnosis.

In order to find out where the problem areas are on your site, you?ll need a good web stats tracking program. A lot of hosting companies have them built into their hosting plans. The good thing about these is that you won?t have to cut and paste tracking code onto each page of your site. The downside is that they aren?t all incredible useful. One of the best web stats products out there is Stats Counter. Their basic service is free and it?s very feature rich. If you?re not already using some form of web stats with page tracking, this is a step to take right away.

The process of improving conversion rates can be well, fun! It?s interesting to see how adding one piece of text here and one link there can make such an incredible impact on your sales. When making changes to your site, be sure to change one thing at a time so that you can isolate the change that is making the impact. If you change too many things at once, you won?t know which change has caused the positive or negative reaction. Develop a plan and get ready to roll out changes on a regular basis, track your results, and get ready to start making sales.

Christine O'Kelly is an internet marketing consultant and professional SEO copywriter. Her blog, http://copywritingtoday.wordpress.com shows small and midsized businesses how to build profitable Web sites though creative content and unique promotional strategies.