This is a guest post by Sonia.

Your bounce rate is the amount of people who look at your webpage and then leave it. This is an important but misunderstood metric. A high bounce rate does not necessarily mean that your page is a bad one (but it may be). It could be that the links pointing to the page are attracting the wrong type of viewer. It may be that your page does not require a long time to view. For example, a page with just one picture on may be useful (and good) but will not require a long time to view. Therefore, it will probably have a high bounce rate.

How can a person leave your page?

There are a few ways that a person may leave your web page. Some people will click the “Back” button, where others may use the favorites bar or RRS feed. Some may even click a link in their history. Others may click the buttons on the top of their browsers and some will type a URL into their address bar.

Some people do not click the links on search engines. Some people choose the pages they want to view by right clicking and opening the links in a new window or new tab. These people will leave your page by clicking to close the tab or clicking to close the window.

What does not count as a bounce?

Many of the analytic programs will give a user a few seconds to do what they are going to do. For example, there are many sources that say Google Analytics wait around ten seconds. That means that if someone clicks away within ten seconds then it counts as a bounce.

If a person clicks a link on the page that they are viewing, then that is not considered as a bounce. The page that they click onto will restart the timer i.e. the user will have around ten seconds to leave the new page and register as a bounce. So if a person views a page but then clicks a link on the page within a few seconds, then it is not seen as a bounce (even if it done within 10 seconds).

If the user opens lots of tabs as he/she views pages, then it will probably take longer than ten seconds for that person to view them all. Therefore most of them will not receive a bounce, even if the user clicks their window/tab and closes it within seconds of looking at it–because it has been longer than ten seconds since the page was opened.

Why are bouncy blogs bad?

As per the example in the introduction, a page may have a high bounce rate because the user can absorb the page’s information quickly–this however is not the case with a blog. Nobody is going to have fully read your blog within ten seconds (as per the Google Analytics example). If a blog has a high bounce rate then it means that people are not reading it. Here are three tips that will help you to reduce your bounce rate; which means more people are actually taking the time to read the text you have lovingly written.

1 – Improve the first paragraph and/or introduction

If people are bouncing then it means that they are spending just a few seconds on the page. Some people will tell you that a bounce happens within three seconds and others will say ten, twelve or fifteen. Whatever you believe, if your blog is getting bounces then people cannot be reading past the first paragraph. Even a fast skim reader is going to absorb very little in fifteen seconds.

Your first paragraph is probably as far as people are getting, which means you need to improve it massively if you want to reduce your bounce rate. Why not make it a very short summary of your entire blog post? Better still, write it a little like a thesis statement and make sure that the question it ends with is very interesting to the viewer.

2 – Make your blog appear to be easy to read

All you need to do is put plenty of white space in the blog post. Do not make it one big chunk of text because it makes it look hard to read. Make sure the font is not a fancy script one, or italic one, because it is too hard to read. Make sure the text’s font is not too small and that there are breaks between the paragraphs.

3 – Create fantastic titles and make sure they match the content

The title is the big selling point for your blog. It needs to be interesting and capture the attention of the reader. You can do this by making it a question, but this is a risky business because your blog post is then pigeonholed as an answer to the question. If the reader does not want the answer to the question then they will not even visit the blog post.

Once you have your fantastic title you must ensure that it matches the content of your blog. Some people will click a link to your blog post, only to find that the content does not match what they presupposed it would–so they bounce. Do not mislead people with your blog title, as they will bounce as soon as they skim a few words of your blog post.

About the Author

My name is Sonia Jackson. I represent the web-site http://www.dissertation-maker.com. We’ll help you to solve all problems with writing different dissertations and research papers in a short time; we’ll answer all your questions and give you useful advice.

We were not paid to publish this post. We simply like receiving guest contributions that may be valuable to our readers. Click here if you would like to be a guest blogger at Blog and Retire.