Guest post by Dimitris Zotos. Dimitris is an editor & SEO Professional at WebSEOAnalytics.com.
Bounce Rate is a percentage that shows the number of visitors that leave a website directly from the page they entered, without viewing other pages of the website. Usually having high percentage leads to low conversion rates. Some of the reasons of high bounce rate are the following:
T These are 8 simple ways to lower your bounce rate:
The design of your website is one of the most important factors. Try using eye-friendly colours, avoid animations that popup in the middle of the page and anything that could distract or make the visitor feel uncomfortable. Organised content without information overflow in one page can deliver your message to the visitors effectively. Avoid using template sites and have the layout designed by a professional. Make sure that the HTML of your website is valid in order to have the same result in all the browsers.
Make sure you have optimised the size of your images, keep the text/html code ratio low and try your best to keep the loading time as low as possible as it affects the user’s experience and search engine results.
The hyperlinks are the power of the web. Your website needs to have a user friendly menu that will allow the visitor to find what he wants easily. Avoid placing the menu on the bottom, try to organise the pages into categories and do not bury the important pages more than 3 clicks away from the homepage. Suggesting relevant products or services and placing links in strategic place in the text is something worth doing. Try using text links that contain keywords and avoid flash menus.
Check that the title, the headers and the meta-tags of each page are relevant with the context. Have an abstract in the first paragraph or try to answer all the visitor’s questions in the first lines of your page. You can use this Keyword Analyzer to test their relevance with the rest of the text. Additionally you can find more information on how to optimize your SEO copy in the article '5 rules for successful SEO copywriting'.
When it comes to SEO, always optimise the pages for relevant keywords. Each page should target to 1 or 2 terms. Make sure they have a good keyword density and that they appear in the important parts of the document such as the titles and headers. Do not try to trick the users and the search engines by including unrelated or too generic keywords. Even if you manage to rank first, the users will leave right away and you will increase the bounce rate.
Try to get some quality links pointing to your page. Make sure they contain the correct anchor text and avoid the common link-building mistakes. You can lure other webmasters to link to your pages by placing good content in your pages (interesting texts, a free service, start a clever marketing campaign etc).
Consider starting a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign on the important keywords of your site. Make sure you will pay a reasonable price-per-click and select the ones that are relevant to you content. Pay attention to the bidding management of your PPC campaign. Bid for the right keywords in order to avoid irrelevant traffic. Microsoft’s adCenter provides lots of useful tools to optimise your campaigns so make sure you use them properly.
As a webmaster, when you evaluate how successful the online marketing campaign was, you should not only take into account the amount of traffic, the page authority or the page views of your site but also focus on the Bounce Rate, the Average Time on Site, the Pages/Visit and the Conversion Rates. Use a web analytics tool, define your goals, study the reports, categorise your visitors based on their behaviour and redesign your SEO plan when needed.
Here are some simple things to bear in mind:
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Good ideas!