The most important thing about your site is getting website visitors and the second most important thing is to be able to keep them there. Bellow are my top 5 ways to keep your visitors on your website and to keep them coming back day after day.

Forums

The great thing about forums is the users make the content, they ask and answer questions, get millions of pages indexed by search engines and come back every day for nothing!

Which Software?

Vbulletin - vBulletin is a powerful, scalable and fully customizable forums package for your web site. It has been written using the Web's quickest-growing scripting language; PHP, and is complemented with a highly efficient and ultra fast back-end database engine built using MySQL.

Invision Power Services - There community suite is perfect for any sized community you may wish to run, from small fansites to a large corporate web presence. We realize that not all communities are the same, which is why we have worked hard to ensure that our suite can match your needs, not vice-versa.

Phpbb - Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

From this table you can see that IPB is a more user friendly software and would rank top our of all forum software's.

Which Modification's do what?

Points - You can allocate a point(s) for every time your user makes a post or topic, points can be traded in for discounts or products. Cheap way to build your forum, ive seen sites where you only get $4.00 of for 1000 points (1000 posts)! If a user has 500 points and need 1000 points to get the product they want, they wont just stop visiting and posting on your forum.

You can use this modification as a currency, buy and sell for credits.

Gallery - Allow your users to add the images and work to your site, also allows other members to post feedback and opinions on it, there for giving a user a reason to come back and check on how the submission is going.

Profiles - Your users get there own personal space on your forum, with options of blogs, friends and comments.

Reputation - Users can post feedback on a user after transactions or help.

Store - A Modification used with points, you can add products and coupons to the store for users to trade in points for.

Here you can see the Invision Power Service's version of the Store Modification.

User's online today - New comers hate to see you have no users online, this modification shows user's and guests how many people have been online your forum in the last 24 hours.

Where to Modifications:

Vbulletin - http://www.vbulletin.org/

Invision Power Services Modifications - http://www.invisionize.com/

Phpbb - http://www.phpbb.com

2. Blogging

Blogs are known as web logs, a website where entries are written such as a diary, but online. The idea is that the owner of the blog will write entries and his visitors will comment with feedback and advice. Blogs are coming ever more powerful over the last couple years with 100,000's starting every week.

Blog Comments

What makes blogging so populer is the power to leave comments on blog posts. This allows the user to get involved and leave there own oppinion. This can be highly effective for some websites as you see bellow in the screen shot "328 Responsese to this post".

Readers by Feedburner

FeedBurner makes it easy to receive content updates in My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Bloglines, and other news readers. Everytime your blog is updated, automaticaly your feedburner list will recieve a email to check out your latest updated. A must have for all blogs.

To find out more about Feedburner click here...

3. User's Choice

Website Poll's

Website poll's let uses have a choice and voice there own oppinions of what they want. A great way to have users come back every week to see what won the poll and to vote for the new poll.

Social Bookmarking

The owners of digg.com brought a whole new meaning to user choice, they allow users to decide weither they like the content or not, if they done then it gets buryed. Bellow in the screen shot your see the choices, to to digg the article (move up the article on the site), comment the article, to bury to the article and to email the article to a friend.

Ask Questions

Users like to get involved in your site, let users ask questions. I've used this technique on a website on Retire at 21. The users ask the questions and i respond with the answers, now this is great because its putting content on your website your visitors want to read. In future if visitors need help or advice they will return to ask more questions.

4. Profiles

Have a profile system on your website is great, with so many options sure gives your users alot of reasons to come back to your site. Myspace excercutes this perfectly, they allow users to send messages, post comments, send mass messages, upload profile pictures, have there own webpage and so much more. Dont take my word for it, take the 200,411,322 members on Myspace for it and in 2 seconds time another 10,000 peoples word for it.

Grab the script here for under 30 bucks!