Why would I want to do this? Let’s put the SEO factor aside for a moment. As a blogger you of course want people to get value from your blog, read several posts and return. A high bounce rate means that most of your visitors just visited the single page they originally landed on and then left your blog. Of course if the article answered their question completely that would be a good thing, even if they left without browsing further. This is more difficult to measure, but you can look at time spent on the site as another clue.
So what have I done to improve my bounce rate? Well a simple and easy thing to do is to use WordPress menus to give users more navigational choices. Prior to WordPress 3.0 you either had to build this or rely on your theme to provide them. Now, under the Appearance Menu you can easily create your own menus. So I created menus on my navigational bar for my main categories: WordPress, SEO and Online Marketing and just pointed them to my category pages. I want to replace these with static pages in the future, but this “phase 1” was quick and easy.
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9 comments
Thanks for the suggestion! Looks like a nice plugin especially if you use thumbnails.
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To add to the Bounce Rate issue, there are a lot of factors to be considered.
The Bounce rate which we see in the Google Analytics is not something the search engines consider for quality purposes. Search engine consider the “Dwell Time” which is nothing but the time spent on a page by the visitor before leaving back to the search results page or closing the page (without going to any other page on the site).
Also, there are two types of bounce rates: Actual Bounce Rate and Standard Bounce Rate
Actual bounce rate: user visiting your page from search results page and leaving within a few seconds without navigating to any other page on the site. The bounce rate what you see in the Google Analytics program is nothing but the Actual Bounce Rate. This is a negative sign as the Dwell Time is just a few seconds.
Standard bounce rate: A person visits a page with high quality content, reads the full content and then leave (spends more than 10 mins). Also, he doesn’t visit any other page on the site. This is still a bounce, but “Standard Bounce Rate”. Here this is not considered as a negative sign by the search engines as the Dwell Time is more than 10 mins!
Reply Great comments. We know that Google can monitor both types of bounce rates via the Google toolbar that many have installed in their browser. It is there that Google can see how quickly someone “bounces” off your site. As you point out, a few seconds is bad, but if they linger on the page for a while indicating they are reading the article and getting value from it, this is not bad even if they do not look at other pages on your site. Most SEOs believe that the data from Google toolbar is given more weight by Google than the data from Analytics.
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I’ve also used the nRelate plugin, it helps to show the most relevant posts of your blog, and you can also add thumbnails to your posts.
Reply Thanks Gerald, that’s a new one for me, I’ll have to check it out!
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Great post, very informative. Great job.
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Hi Kathy Alice,
I am totally with you. Bounce rate definetly IS a factor that goes into ranking algorithms of different search engines. Every webmaster should try to give the visitors an exclusive time on their website to reduce bouncerate.
I use videos and the free Linkwithin plugin to do so. Just a tip 😉
regards, Phil
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