Decreasing your Bounce Rate - November 11th, 2008
Every website or blog has a purpose, whether it is a subscription site or one that is simply addressing opinions and thoughts on a given subject. Achieving this goal is called a conversion and the worst enemy of any conversion is the bounce rate.
How is the bounce rate measured? With the use of Google analytics or Woopra webmasters can check their bounce rate. Any bounce rate below 50% is ok but most bounce rates are a lot higher. Let’s put it this way, if your bounce rate is 80% that means you are losing 80 out of 100 people on your website.
Today I would like to address some simple steps to lower your bounce rate and hopefully increase your conversions.
Readability
Present your text properly, viewers don’t want to see boring text with no bold or underlined text. Reading a block of normal un-formatted text is boring. Most people are usually skim reading our content to get the desired content. By helping the end user achieve this, throughput is greater.
Do not distract your audience
Do no distract your users by adverts, external links and un-related media. This falls into the same category as readability, if your users cannot find the content they want, viewers will bounce.
Search facilities
If your website has a search functionality then use it! Make sure the search form is positioned at the top of your page. By doing so viewers can quickly search your website for content, hopefully eliminating the bounce rate issue.
S.Whiston, SEO Programmer
