NewOfferings

8 Steps to Improve Your Bounce Rate!

Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by admin.

In my previous post Bounce Rate - How Much Do Visitors Really Like Your Site? I gave an introduction to Bounce Rate. In short, Bounce Rate measures how many people come to a page on your site and never click another link. In this post I’ll discuss what you can do about this to get people to stay on your site.

1. Include Clear Call-to-Actions

If you want a visitor to click on links and dig further into your site, why not ask them? Many websites fail to offer targeted options for visitors. Here is an extreme case.

Notice that this website, samanzerin.com, includes NO links. Even the email address has no hyperlink. The designers might argue that the site is simply a calling-card for their magician client, but don’t you think it would be helpful to a visitor to view pages about the magician, where they can see him perform, what people have to say about his magic, links to videos of past performances?

The best sites include clear, targeted links to compel the visitor to read more. RELATED ARTICLE or RELATED TAG sections at the bottom of your articles are helpful.  ‘Popular article’ and ‘most commented’ widgets like the one you see in the top-right of this page can also be a plus.

Why not include the call-to-action text right at the bottom of the article? For example, most blog posts (including many of mine) simply ask the read to comment in the box below. Why not include specific links asking them to read something related? Look at the bottom of this post for an example of this.

[...]

Continue Reading

Google Analytics - Bounce Rate: The Simply Powerful Metric

Posted on 13. Apr, 2009 by admin.

I recently did a post on Bounce Rate and one of my readers pointed out that there’s a good video by Google by Avinash Kaushik on this subject. Most of the ideas in the video are discussed in my post, but I would definitely recommend that you view this. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in delving further into the world of web analytics visit Avinash Kaushik’s web analytics blog.

Around half-way through the video Avinash mentions that the Bounce Rate on the slide he’s discussing is great, but it’s very difficult to see what it is. I did some stopping and starting of the video to save you the trouble and it turns out that the rate is 31.7%.

Continue Reading

Linkbaiting - Generating “Honest” Links on the Web

Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by ScotRobinson.

Linkbaiting.  Sounds like another one of those nefarious techniques employed by slimmy web-spammers used to fool Google into believing that a site has more links than it really should with the goal of getting better rankings.   In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.  Eric Ward has an excellent post which explains it in depth (note: Eric is a true pioneer who I worked with many years ago on some web press releases through his URLwire service and received excellent results for my projects!).

Linkbaiting in a nutshell is a way to generate what I call “honest” links.   Other folks will link to you because they WANT to link to you, not because you are paying them to link to your site, spamming them with comments or agreeing to exchange links.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but you might be wondering “why would someone want to link with me?  What do I have to offer?”   Well boys and girls, you need to give people a reason to link to you.  [...]

Continue Reading