Reduce The Bounce Rate Of Your Blog
Written by Stefan Vervoort on June 5, 2008You are a blogger and you analyze your statistics from time to time. One point this software tracks is the ‘bounce rate‘. The bounce rate will tell you how many visitors click through to another page. The lower your bounce rate, the higher your pages views and the more people will come back for quality content.
If you have a high bounce rate, it might be a good idea to improve your website or blog. This question might rise to you: What can you do improve the bounce rate of your blog?
In this post, I will give you some pointers you should look at to keep visitors on your website and lower your bounce rate.
1. Structured navigation – Usually, people looking for a tutorial, search Google and they want to find the needed information as fast as possible. If they can’t find it right away, they leave and look for another site. If you have a structured navigation, you might seduce those people to click through to your homepage, about page or another article interested to them.
2. Uncluttering your sidebar – You should make sure your blog homepage contains the most useful information. Stop using those funny and useless widgets; instead you should use a ‘popular article’ widget or a ‘tag cloud’. People will more likely click on an article if they can find it right away, without looking through all kind of mess first.
3. Related articles – Your blog has a niche, meaning you have more tutorials and articles on the same subject. Why not make it easier for your visitors to click through a ‘related article’, at the end of your post? A nice plugin is available to do this called ‘Yet another Related Posts Plugin’ and will add a bunch of related posts at the end of your post.
4. About page – Some weblogs noticed new visitors navigated to the about page after they’ve read an article. It is important to make that information easy to find. People are lazy and if they can’t find it right away, they will leave. Help them and help yourself. People might stick around faster if they see there is a real guy or girl behind the weblog.
5. Surveys and polls – Interacting with your visitors is always a good idea. Eventually you could add a poll or survey to your blog and see what results they bring in. When people see an interesting question, they might reply or vote and stick around.
Questions
Of course, there are more points you could look at, but I think these are the most important. If you have any suggestions please mention them in the comments.
This article is written by:
Name: Stefan Vervoort
URL: http://www.divitodesign.com
Description: I am a 18-year-old webdesigner and blogger from Waalwijk, the Netherlands. I also blog at WPTOY and work at DivitoMedia.
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Great article. Really useful.I recently moved to Wordpress from blogger and really am amazed with it. Regretting the late move. Anyway this article will help me do a better blog now. I never knew the about page was so important. thanks
Personally, I usually look for a tags list after reading an article, especially on a blog you haven’t visited before. It gives a good quick overview of the content and you usually can quickly pick out the content you are interested in.
nice job with the write-up.I twill be really useful for new blogger. Under my opinion the structure and the articles are the really important aspects to look into. Anyway, great job again. Love your blog.
That’s a really good article. It will be so much useful for newbies. And even I learnt few stuff in spite of the fact that I have been using WP for few years now. Thanks a bunch. Cheers
Clear well structure content and posts help as well. When I design a blog, I try and think about what the user is coming to the blog for, by doing this from the start and basing the navigation etc around it, your bounce rate will be low from the offset.
I should also add that never join low quality traffic networks since it will terribly increase your bounce rate. The page views will look like high but advertisers are solely interested in positive ROI conversions. If a blogger writes in high quality unique articles, bounce rate naturally should be low.
Thanks for the info stefan, I am fairly new to blogging with only a couple of blogs up, I like the idea of putting surveys up on the blog will give that a try
A really informative and interesting article. I do agree with you about the lack of content. A blog is really good with content. Not only just design. Design does play a part in attracting users but it is not as important as content