How to improve our answer ratio

Question

According to our stats, this beta is doing well in almost every respect. We have a good number of questions, they are almost all getting answered, and our user and visitor numbers are growing steadily.

The biggest shortfall seems to be in the "answers per question" which SE dictates should be "At least 2.5 for a healthy beta." While I'm not sure this is necessarily true (a lot of questions do have only one possible answer) it seems we need to improve this statistic if nothing else to make the cut with SE.

Answer 1

Some ideas for accomplishing this:

• When someone else posts an answer that looks better than yours, don't delete your own. Up-vote theirs instead.
• If you find yourself writing a long comment that offers a solution, make it an answer instead.
• When a question already has an answer but there might be an alternative approach, post it.
• If you find yourself answering a question to say "you could do either A or B" post them as two different answers.

Answer 2

While the existing answer here is a good one, I want to point out that we no longer put nearly as much emphasis on the "answer ratio" stat when evaluating sites as we once did. We want to encourage a focus on quality, not quantity.

For (much) more information, see Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites on Meta Stack Exchange.