Curtailing Your Bounce Rate- The Do-able And Easy Way

Posted on July 21st, 2012. Written by Suhail.

Users of Google analytics would probably be familiar with a measuring unit known as the ‘bounce rate’. In a layman’s term, bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who visited your website but didn’t venture, beyond the page they entered through.

Increased bounce rate is a clear indicator of the fact that your landing pages aren’t relevant enough to retain the visitor’s interest and aren’t compelling them to explore, the remaining site. This can ultimately create an adverse impact on your website’s search engine ranking. Websites that have a low bounce rate are often favored by search engines like Google and others and are usually given, a higher rank.

How To Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

The objective of this article is to show you simple tweaks and methods which you can employ to reduce the bounce rate of your webpage. Following these methods while creating new pages and posts, will ensure the bounce rate going down significantly. This would mean that the visitors are now taking an interest in your pages and staying, instead of leaving them, immediately.

Post Internal Links To Top Position On The Pages

One of the simplest and most effective ways to curtail bounce rate is to post internal links to the top position on your pages. I am assuming you are well aware of the role internal links play, in achieving high search engine ranking. You can further spruce-up the process up by adding anchor-text optimized links to remaining pages of your site, but take due care to post them above page fold. This process is highly recommended.

Ad Over Immersion

Over indulgence in populating your site with advertisements is one of the primary reasons of visitors, quickly leaving a site. What is being referred to here is the disturbance in your Ad-sense banners and other forms of advertisements that obscure the visitor’s view of the site and makes them upset.

These tactics might have been popular during the emerging days of the internet, but nowadays, these are usually associated with ‘banner blindness’. Banner blindness refers to a scenario where people don’t pay attention to such interfering forms of advertising.

Over-populating your site with such intrusive ads is the worst case scenario as it will simply lead visitors leaving the website, in no time. This is clearly not the way to entice users to remain on your site as no one wants to be bombarded with such banners, which clearly want to trick the visitors into clicking.

If you absolutely must indulge in the usage of banners, keep their numbers to a bare minimum and ensure that the visual ads don’t obscure the content of your website from the user’s view.

Quick Loading Pages

Nothing annoys the users more than waiting for a page to load! Imagine a scenario where you click a search result which directs you to a page that seems to take forever to load. It’s a common online experience but you have to make sure your site doesn’t suffer from such a thing. If your landing pages take a long time to load, then it would directly contribute to an increase in your bounce rate.

Considering that internet bandwidth and patience level varies from user to user, make sure that your site pages are quick to load to retain visitors. Here are some tips that would enable you to reduce your site’s loading time:

• Use pingdoom tool to analyze your load time. It’s a free tool that grades your website out of 100, based on the load time
•  ‘Save for web’ option would ensure that your images are of small size and load quickly

Suhail

Professional content writer having experience in writing all types of contents like articles, blogs, ebooks, squidoo lenses, hubpages, reviews, web content, news, press releases, link wheel creation and much more.Check out my Gigs here: http://www.seoclerks.com/user/Suhail

1 Responses »

1. 

   Bert

   July 24, 2012 • 3:10 pm

   You forgot to mention that having outgoing links opening in a new page, will also lower the bounce rate! However, many viewers are also put off by this.