How to Keep Your Visitors on Your Site.

To define the bounce rate in layman's terms, it's the percentage of people who enter your website and then leave (bounce) without visiting anymore pages.  This happens often by the reader clicking another link from your blog, closing the window, clicking the back button or inactivity once on your blog for an allotted amount of time.  So, how do you keep your readers on your page and prevent them from bouncing off of your page?  There are a few things to try to lower your bounce rate! (An ideal bounce rate is 20%-40%. Anything above 40% needs to be addressed.  This means that your visitors are not really reading your material.)

What could be raising your bounce rate?

• Too many external links towards the top of your site - They could be drawing too much attention to themselves rather than your blog and your content.

• A cluttered blog.  If you have too much content on your sidebar as well as the main section of your page, it might be too overwhelming to the reader.  A cluttered sidebar is unprofessional and draws attention away from what really matters; the content.

• Non Relevant Content is another reason.  If your keywords are completely irrelevant to what your content is about, the user will probably close the window or go back to search results.  You want to make sure that your related content is seen by the searcher.

• Navigation is hard to find would be another reason.  You want to make sure that your navigation is extremely easy to be seen and in an area that is very clear to the reader.  Group all related pages under one subtitle in the navigation so they're easy to find. (i.e., "Recipes", "Coupons", "Tips & Tricks", etc...)

Have interesting content, catchy post titles and use the bold and italic features to break up your content a bit.  Add some related photos to your posts to keep them interesting and use bullets when needed.  All of these help to break up the monotonous tone of a solid paragraph.  At the end of your posts, a great idea is to use LinkWithin.  Why?  It shows related posts that would be of interest to your reader as well.  It keeps them in your site and keeps them reading older posts! (Another good idea is to use a "recent post" widget on your sidebar.  This gives them even more to read!)

I cannot stress enough how important a clean look is to any website, blog or business.  You want your page to look professional and you want the front page to speak volumes about what your site is about at first glance.  Most people do not search too much into your site if the topic isn't apparent.  If your site is too confusing and hard to read, they'll go elsewhere where the point is straight forward. 

There are also ways to check to make sure the SEO keywords you're using are keywords with low bounce rates.  Google Adwords Keywords is a great tool to use to ensure that your keywords have low competition ratings. This, in conjunction with ensuring that your SEO keywords match your site's content. To summarize; low bounce rate keywords and keyword integrity are the two essential things to remember when coming up with SEO keywords for your site.