An essential element of the success of any Internet Marketing campaign is the ability to not only generate traffic to your website, but capturing the interest of the visitor once he's on your site. There are a number of techniques that the best Internet Marketing Strategies employ to ensure that their Website Design encourages a user to linger.

To a great degree all Internet marketing strategies - article marketing, blogging, search engine optimization and email marketing, depend on the quality of your Website design to close the sale.

As you design and continually refine your Website, maintain constant focus on what you are trying to accomplish, what message you are trying to communicate. All the principles in the world are worthless without vigilance to your ultimate objective.

Here are five fundamental rules of thumb to observe to make sure your Website performs well.

1. Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2. Avoid excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable Website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3. Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

5. Don't make them think 

If your potential customer has to really think through each click on your site, that will prevent them from getting the most out of your website experience. Make your website and content obvious to every level of web user, and your site will have more success.

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If you analyze every aspect of your Website Design and ask the question - 'does this contribute to my ultimate objective?' - your Website should evolve into a significant contributor for your Internet Marketing efforts.