Wacdesigns | Technology, Web 2.0 and Life

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

Definition: A bounce occurs when a person leaves your website after reaching your entry page. The above cases can be considered equally as bounces from your website.

1) Visitor enters your site and press back immediately (before or even after the page has loaded)

2) Visitor waits for the page to load stays on this page for some time and then press back or navigate on another site. ( In this case the visitor might have found the information and then chose to navigate elsewhere to either find some supplementary information. Or it could be that he/she might not have found it but just read some pieces to see what is there, a third case could be the persons did not like the: website, content or colors on the site and went away.)

Therefore there seems to be considerable number of aspects to take into consideration to get a more precise question about “Why is my bounce rate so high ?”. There isn’t any straight forward answer to this question, but there are many questions that can lead to possible solutions:

When you ask your questions about bounce rate here are the different questions that might come to your mind.

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

User Interface
Is my layout/presentation/design attractive to visitors ?
Does my pages load slowly ?
Do my page have appropriate ads ? Are these ads non-aggressive towards the user ?
Is your page browser friendly ? (Can be views at any resolution with any browser the same way)

Content

Does  the user find what they are looking for ? ( High bounce rate and high time on site visits)
Is there enough information to show to the user ? Do I display enough or too much ?
From keywords analysis are the entry keyword valid for the content that the entry page ?

These are few questions, and there are much more that can come across when you want to decrease the bounce rate of your website. Personally I think that depending on your audience your bounce rate will always vary. There will be always accidental clicks (people make mistakes).

As mentioned on Bounce Rate article on Wikipedia: Taking the example of news site, which have all their information on the first page itself. People might just scan the page and then exit to another website. News website might just be off having 80% bounce rate with a satisfied visitor who was able to have what he came for. From this point of view: Informative website will most likely have high bounce rate compared to E-Commerce one’s for example where you must navigate on several page to be able to perform a checkout.

A word of conclusion:

Source Wikipedia:
Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

References and useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/how-high-is-your-bounce-rate/2006/02/09/

The problem today, is that we have a great asp.net website but search engines are indexing the http://greataspnetwebsite.com instead of http://www.greataspnetwebsite.com, this is commonly seen on the web and there are several ways to archive a good result for making the non-www to www domain. This redirection should be a 301 Permanently Moved, otherwise you will might lose your search engine indexed page or become duplicate content for your non-www and www domain. Here are easy steps how to archive a quick and clean Permanent Redirection using IIS.

Consider the case where we already have a website in IIS called: greataspnetwebsite.com

• Go to IIS Manager
• Create a new website that point to the same directory as your existing one
• Select the newly created website, open the properties box
• In the option button “When connecting to this resource the content should come from” should be change to “A redirection to a URL“
• Specify the URL http://www.greataspnetwebsite.com
• Select the check box that says “A permanent redirection for this resource.”

Today, I’ll talk a bit about how ASP.NET handles HTML rendering of controls such as <asp:HyperLink> and <asp:Label>.  If you have developed using ASP.NET you must have noticed that when an <asp:Hyperlink> or <asp:Label> is rendered you will find something like that:

<html>

<a id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_rptShoppingCart_ctl00_lnkGotoCheckout" href="#" class="someCss">delete</a>

</html>

From an ASP.NET point of view, this is fine, since all object rendered should be identified uniquely on the client side. But many a time these are useless, since these hyperlinks are not used to trigger any server side events. Thus the id attributes just takes up a lot of space on your HTML and Page Size when you have many links like that. If you don’t want to have those, here is a solution I came up with, you can create custom server controls that inherits from the control that you want to remove the id attribute tag from.

Here is sample of the code that i used to remove the id attribute from the Hyperlink Control, without basically removing all the features provided by the Hyperlink control such as being able to handle Resource files for globalization.

[ToolboxData("<{0}:HyperLinkEx runat=server></{0}:HyperLinkEx>")]
public class HyperLinkEx: System.Web.UI.WebControls.HyperLink
{
private string rel;

/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the rel.
/// </summary>
/// <value>The rel.</value>
public string Rel
{
get { return rel; }
set { rel = value; }
}

/// <summary>
/// Renders the control to the specified HTML writer.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="writer">The <see cref="T:System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter"></see> object that receives the control content.</param>
protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

sb.Append("<a");

if (this.NavigateUrl.StartsWith("~"))
this.NavigateUrl = ResolveClientUrl(this.NavigateUrl);
sb.Append(" href=\"" + this.NavigateUrl + "\"");

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(rel)) sb.Append(" rel=\"" + rel + "\"");
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.CssClass)) sb.Append(" class=\"" + this.CssClass + "\"");
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.Target)) sb.Append(" target=\"" + this.Target + "\"");
if (this.Attributes["onclick"] != null) sb.Append(" onclick=\"" + this.Attributes["onclick"] + "\"");

sb.Append(">");

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ImageUrl)) //Some image were found
{
if (this.ImageUrl.StartsWith("~"))
this.ImageUrl = ResolveClientUrl(this.ImageUrl);
sb.Append("<img src=\"" + this.ImageUrl + "\" alt=\"" + this.Text + "\" title=\"" + this.Text + "\" border=\"0\" />");
}
else
{
sb.Append(this.Text);
}

sb.Append("</a>");
writer.Write(sb.ToString());
}

}

In this source code, i have overridden the render method of the control and outputted a cleaner HTML anchor with no Id attributes. I have also added support for ImageURL attribute of the hyperlink server control, thus maintaining the most of the asp:Hyperlink features.

I have also created a tiny library with some controls: <asp:HyperLink>, <asp:Label>, <asp:Image> which i think are the controls that need not have the id attribute in every scenario.

You can find it for download under GNU Public Licence here.

SEOQuiz determines your aptitude in being an SEO Expert, even though SEO is not really what i do the best, i took the test just for the fun of knowing how good or (BAD is this case) here is my result:

SEO Novice - 52%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Here i am a novice, thus i must seek more knowledge or just leave it be and get the work done, by real experts

Just saw that from my google webmaster tools, when you search for the “joost goodies“, i even come in front of joost website. Kind of interesting to note… that the link has only some text and nothing more… see the original post here.

From webopedia

Short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

There are must be more than thousands of checklist for SEO on the web. I have been involved in some SEO lately and would like to share this experience. This is a quick list that will make sure that you climb up your page rank with Search Engine you will most likely go to be on the first page of Google.

I’ll take the example of some website who produces and sells boat models.

• Make sure that the pages are well planned and consistent
  • Make use of well structured sentences that always reflect what user might type in to get to your website
  • Do not spam your pages with keywords
  • Do not put too much content on a page, because users won’t read them all.
  • If you have a page for displaying for e.g a boat model “The Bounty” make sure that you mention “The Bounty”
    as much as you can on the page. e.g The heading of the page, the link to historical background to the boat, in the description of the model itself. This will will help you gain evidence that this page is related to “The Bounty”
• Get backlinked whenever possible
  • Each time your backlinked, that is another website if pointing on yours, you get some influence on the search engine. You should make sure that you “buzz” your website as much as possible. Try forums and so on.
  • Make sure that the website your backlinked to is related to your bussiness background. E.g your won’t post your link on a Computer Programming Forum, this does not make anysense. Taking the e.g of the boat models website what could make sense are some souvenir website or even collectioners website to get backlinked from.
• Make extensive use of metatags keywords, description, abstract
  • These are very important make sure that you include these on everypage that you want to be referenced by the search engine
  • Also make sure that these reflects the content of your page. do not use keywords that are not even found in your page, this will not make any sense and the search engine bot might just ignore it. e.g if you have “boat, model, miniature, ship, bounty” in your keyword meta tag. Make sure that these keywords are mentioned in your page content.
• Make use of URL Rewritting
  • Using URL Rewritting will be very benefit to your website. This will boost up your website referencing. Take for example of bussiness of boat models. If i have a decriptive page of my boat model the page URL should be something like that www.boatmodel.com/The_Bounty_Model.html instead of something like that www.boatmodel.com/Product.php?p=10223
  • These URL will help your website gain in web rank. As for meta tags the keywords in those user friendly URL should also be present in your page content.
• The most and not the least make your website comfortable and easy to use.
  • This is only a small talk about website usability, Your website should be as simple as possible depending on what is your audience. you should put in mind that not everyone is as expert as your developer. normal people don’t know that they must double click on some menu for something to happen of you should drag and drop some stuff in your browser for some other things to happen. Thus first place emphasis on the usability of your website, to make sure that when a user comes once, he/she will always want to be back some other time, because the website is very friendly and make me want to be back

This is a little of what i have learned for SEO. Hope that this can be of help.