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

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

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.