Bounce Rate is percentage of visitors who “bounce” away after landing on your site i.e. the percentage of people who visit your site, look at one page, then leave rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site
The following formula is used to calculate bounce rate:
Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits
In general parlance, the lower the bounce rate the more the no. of page views and the better the conversion rate of your blog.
Tips to reduce bounce rate of your blog:
1. WebSite Loading Time - If your website is loading slowly, visitors tend to go away rather than wait for your site to load. Get good webhosting like hostgator & try to reduce the no. of plugins that you use on blog. You can also use plugins like W3 Total Cache to cache your pages which will help reduce your loading time.
2. Web Layout & Design - Whether you like it or not, presentation is one of the deciding factors for a visitor to look deeper into your site or leave. You can get a great theme like Thesis and customize it for a good layout & design.
3. Great Content - It’s said repeatedly everywhere that content is king. Google said it after their panda update. Have content that really stands out and is unique, do not keyword stuff your content and try to write for readers rather than search engines. Make sure to have relevant content to your niche as a visitor comes to your set with a certain set of expectations, if you’re not able to live up to it with your content – they bounce.
4. Catchy Titles – Great & catchy titles can spark up your visitor’s interest to further check out your posts. They definitely go a long way in increasing your page view and in effect reducing bounce rate
5. Related & Random Posts - Plugins like YAARP, Outbrain & widgets like popular posts, random posts, most recent at the end of a post or on your sidebar can go a long way in promoting your posts with great catchy titles to your visitors.
6. Interlinking to Your Old Posts – Interlinking to your old posts provides more relevant resources to your visitor’s to refer back to, which helps decrease your bounce rate. You can achieve this using SEO Smart Links & Insights Plugin
7. Keyword Research for Search Engine Traffic - Perform keyword research for keywords related to your niche and try to rank for them. With this you will ensure that you’re getting targeted traffic who is interested in your content and tend to fish out more content than just a page view.
8. Search Box – Place a very prominent search box on your site. This will help visitor’s look for content and navigate to different parts of your site, if they’re not interested in what they’re currently reading.
9. Tag Cloud – A tag cloud of a site can give a visitor and overall idea of what the main topics of discussion are. A tag cloud can also be used as an additional navigation path for visitor’s to refer, thus decreasing bounce rate
10. Videos - Videos are excellent to communicate your point to visitor’s. However, there are a lot of sites that have autoplay of videos as a default which can be very irritating and real put off for visitors, thereby increasing bounce rate. Also, if you add & embed YouTube video - make sure to deselect ”Include related videos”option as this provides an external path to your visitors.
11. External Linking – Maintain this to a minimum in terms of advertisements and avoid external links on the page that visitors see when they land on your site.
These are a few of the many pointers that would help reduce bounce rate of you site. What are your strategies?
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Most of the points are good to reduce bounce rate but I have a doubt regarding the use of videos for lowering bounce rate. Why a person seeing a video will visit other pages in the site? I cant understand the link between them.
Hey Mukundan – May be i was not to clear about that point.. What i was trying to communiate here is that you need shut off autoplay of videos because they tend to drive visitors away..
Secondly, if you’re adding you tube videos and not deselecting ”Include related videos” option.. the visitor might just plan to see other videos and exit your site..
Good tips to reduce bounce rate ….. All points that have worked for me except #9 & #10
The points which you have mentioned are really good to reduce the bounce rate. I think #2, #6 and #8 are good and appreciable. Catchy titles will also boost up viewers to view other pages of your site.
@ Samantha – Welcome to my blog & thanks for your comment. Yup, these points will help you reduce bounce rate
u said 10 points and listed are 11. Also, I think Tag cloud is not good as Google is concerned. Tag Cloud lists all keywrds resulting in Keyword stuffing. So sud avoid it
ATUL
@ Atul – It’ll be great if you could take advantage of keywordluv and use your real name as well.
Thanks for your comments, i really have no idea how google looks at tag cloud.. need to check this out.. thanks for your comment
Great Tips …
I definitely Follow them
Thanks
Very good list of tips! You have to always ask yourself “If I were someone else and I landed on this website looking for something, would I stay for more?”
@ Mohammed – Thanks for your visit.. what you said is so true and to the point.
Besides moving from a bad web host to a good one, the best way to speed up the site (suggestion #1) is to…
Post load your javascript.
There is a lot of bad javascript modules/plugins/code out there that can be very CPU heavy for the visitor’s browser. That will make it seem like your website is loading slow. So make sure you load all that stuff after the page and images download when appropriate.
Hi Eliza – Thanks for the inputs.. do you know of any wordpress plugin that delays loading of javascript
It really depends on the template. Some designers/template creators optimize their works better for SEO and page speed than others. You can modify the template if it doesn’t, but then you’ll have to keep an eye on it when its time to update the template file that will undo your changes.
On your template you have a decent amount of javascript. Try this. Saving your one of your blog pages as an HTML file. Check it in Page Speed and YSlow and write down the scores and total download times. Then edit the HTML code and move all the javascript to the bottom. Be sure to maintain the order of the statements since some things have to load first like the external before the inline commands. Check to make sure everything on the page works like the hoverovers, javascript form checking, etc. Then re-run Page Speed and YSlow and see if you get an improvement.
If everything works and you see an improvement, you might want to modify your template. Be sure to do more testing on a copy before you modify the live site.
There are many javascript code that is perfect for post loading like live Twitter updates, Facebook plugins, form checking, etc. But some stuff might also be critical and need to load before. Test and re-test.
Eliza – Although im not that technically inclined, the way you’ve explained it is great..
Thanks for your inputs, will definitely check out the method you’ve suggested..
Thank you for every other informative website. The place else could I get that type of info written in such a perfect means? I have a undertaking that I am just now running on, and I have been on the look out for such information.
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