My last article on Bounce Rates explained why it was important for bloggers to keep rates as low as possible to avoid being penalized in the search engine rankings. All things being equal, lower bounce rates equals higher ranking. To refresh your memory, the following is the Bounce Rate definition given by Google :
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
It doesn’t matter that I don’t care if people visit my main page and then move on, Google cares. So I’ve made it my goal to try and improve my SEO efforts; an early New Year Resolution of sorts. To reach my goal I’ve reinstalled Google Analytics and have begun monitoring my ranking for my top keywords . Here are some of the ideas I’ve been exploring:
- Do not use Traffic Exchange Networks that encourage visitors to stay for 3 seconds just to drop a card or click a link.
- Encourage more comments by responding as often as possible to existing comments. Readers will see that their comment is meaningful to the author.
- Use a plugin to encourage first time visitors to subscribe to my RSS feed. I’m using the included module with Headspace2.
- Targeting my keywords more carefully. Use the same keywords that I use for tags.
- Put more effort into writing each post. Try not to turn visitors away with spelling mistakes and bad punctuation. Break up monotonous blocks of text.
- Be opinionated and let readers know how I feel. Agree or disagree, people will be more likely to respond if you can invoke an emotional response.
- Making careful use of the <!–more–> tag. Let the reader get all the way to the good stuff, then hit them with the tag. This only works on those who have bookmarked my front page.
As you can see, the idea is to engage the reader without annoying them and to make the content more relevant to my search visitors.
Nice follow up Turnip. And nice to see what you’ll be doing. I’m mimicking many of those at the moment myself — to try and correct the damage that I didn’t even realize was being done.
One I would suggest for other people reading (you do this already Turnip, as you did in the first line of this very post, for ex.), interlink between articles on your site when it’s relevant to the topic at hand.
I’ve gotten great click-through between articles when I have either linked them through the post itself or more infrequently, a trackback. (I’ve also had semi-success in writing series of posts which all interlink to each other through a plugin. People nav. between “chapters”)
If people are clicking through to other articles on your site, they are spending time there rather than bouncing away.
Impressive list. Clever thinking on the item regarding the more link.
Glad you liked it Lyndi! Notice I’m using the “Custom More Feature” from the headspace2 plugin. That allows me to write clever things like “You read this far, now click here to get to the good stuff!”. Well, you get the idea, I’m no P.T. Barnum
Jack: Great suggestion linking to your own articles. Just don’t add the “nofollow” tag. Too late for me to rename the article “Top 8 Tips”, so your tip is a bonus one for those who clicked through to read the comments.
Great thoughts. Any social networking sites or social bookmarking sites are always going to hurt your bounce rate. Those people are probably not even going to subscribe to your blog so I always find it worthless to even try to target those people.
I struggle with where to place my “more” link. I’m still not sold on using it. I wonder if there’s a way to see how many people click through. Sorry for the rambling, but meant to say, will keep in mind your advice.
Blog Expert: I haven’t abandoned social networks completely, because I feel networking is important. I just am not focusing on the mindless traffic from them.
Kristine: Some people don’t like it from a reader’s perspective. A reader who wants to read your comments is going to click “read more” anyway. I’m hoping to grab those casual readers who want to finish the article. A 2nd bonus is it moves my other articles slightly higher on the page. By showing more of each article, I expand the contennt on my homepage as well. It’s an experiment. We’ll see how it goes.
your last two post were indeed a turnaround of your previous posts about entrecard and bounce rates.
my bounce rates are improving now. even the traffic from stumbleupon. no more of the lightning-quick visits.
Ceblogger: If you check the Alexa rank on my homepage, Dec 5th is the date I left Entrecard. Look what happened since then. My visits are 170 fewer per day, down from 480 to 310 minimum, but my Alexa’s have skyrocketed.
This is yet another amazing post. I’m glad I’ve got your RSS feed. Anyway, what is the target bounce rate? I am trying to find out how to delete my account with EntreCard, because I’m getting a lot of poor traffic from there. I have a do-follow blog, but I’m getting a lot of comments that pretty much re-iterate the post title with a link with an anchor like “Business Loans.” Plus, it probably kills my bounce rate.
Personally, I find Turnip of Power more interesting post-Entrecard.
If I can get below 50%, I’ll be happy. Below 20% is probably impossible. so anywhere between those two numbers would be my target.
Thanks for those tips..I will surely have to try that since few days ago when I chcked my Google Analytics account for my site smartbloggerz.com it was showing a bounce rate of 69% something something..
Thanks again.
Still with ECard, my numbers prove what you are saying here, Turnip. My bounce rate stays in the high 80s, no matter what I try to improve it within that system. I think I will spend the week doing less dropping and more on Promote. Thanks for the great article. It’s good to know, once and for all, what exactly bounce rate is.
I ran into the same issues, especially when I was with EC. Some of the things I did to lower my rate were
1) Include a related articles section at the bottom of the page
2) Make the article more “scannable”. If it’s easier to read, they stay longer.
3) Added an author bio at the bottom of every article. It links to my about page.
4) Ditch EC.
This made a 10% improvement on my bounce rate.
Great article!
Thanks for letting us know something about Bounce Rate. I used analytics before but then switched to statcounter. I’ve wondered about this bounce rate thingy in my analytics stats – now I know!
To be honest, I’m not really much into SEO because my blog is basically a personaly blog and I’m planning to rely on paid post for my monetization instead of adsense. I do have some alternative ads though such as Adbrite and Bidvertiser. They’re doing great so far.
This indeed is an eye opener. One of my focus in the first quarter of this year is to improve on my alexa ranking and I think this will definitely help.
Good idea!