This is a guest post by Anil Gupta. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
A high bounce rate is always quite irritating for a blogger. A high bounce rate means that most readers are just coming to your site and exiting almost immediately without browsing your blog. It is very undesirable to have a high bounce rate as it will cause you to have poor conversions for your affiliate products. Your advertisements will fail to perform well and basically it can heavily affect your monetization from the blog. Also, a high bounce rate suggests that your content is not providing quality to the readers.
5 Ways To Reduce The Bounce Rate Of A WordPress Blog
1. Use Excerpts
If you are good at writing interesting titles then using excerpts instead of displaying the whole article in the front page is very effective. Complete posts may cause your readers to simply scan the article and leave. Whereas, if your titles are interesting and you are providing only the excerpts then you are arousing the curiosity of readers. They will click on the post and tend to stay longer on your blog. Which is why using excerpts is a great way to reduce your bounce rate drastically.
2. Interlink your posts
When you write an article always make it a point to link a few keywords in the article to any previous articles you may have written related to it. This way you are providing good search engine optimization for your blog. Apart from that interlinking your posts will also cause your readers to stay longer as they may click on the hyperlinked keywords for further understanding. This is another way blogger try to reduce their bounce rate.
3. Related Posts Plugin
This plugin will help you reduce your bounce rate as well. Related posts plugin is a plugin where you can include links to previous posts that may be related to the current post the visitor has read. So if the related posts are interesting, the reader will surely browse them also. Random posts plugin in the sidebar is again a very effective way to give maximum coverage to all your posts and reduce bounce rate.
4. Quality of content
No matter what you do if the quality of your content is poor then it very unlikely any reader will stay for too long. For that reason ensure that your content is always providing value to your readers. Then you will automatically see that your bounce rate is decreasing.
5. More engaging elements
I would ask you to add more call to action and engaging elements on your blog. There are many things that you can do to get more engagement from your blog readers and which will ultimetely help you improve your blog bounce rate like:
- Run a contest on your blog.
- Create a poll around a topic, your blog readers will be interested in.
- Create icons or links to submit your posts on social networks.
- Ask your blog readers to subscribe your RSS Feed, Follow you on Twitter or become a Fan of your facebook page etc.
How much is your blog bounce rate? And do you know of any other way of improving a blog bounce rate, please share in the comments section below.
About Author :
Anil Gupta writes about ways to make money online, blogging, seo and social media related topics like how to promote Facebook Fan Page on his ScopeForMoney.com blog.
About Lee Ka Hoong
Blogspot users also can use these steps to low down bounce rate.Thanks Lee for sharing nice tips.
Hi,
This is really great, interlinking and use of related posts plugin is my best bet.
Thanks a lot for the great post.
.-= Onibalusi Bamidele @ 16 year old entrepreneur´s last blog ..Study your audience =-.
Great list of ideas to help with bounce rate.
I have been playing around with idea of using the Exerts instead of full posts, but with that I would have to go back and do the exerts for most of the blog posts I have done, and for me this will take a lot of time I really do not have.
.-= element321´s last blog ..Blogging Tips, DoFollow Debate, and Web Design Tips Weekly Round Up April 05, 2009 =-.
Most of the time I stay and read on because of the content. I realise that if the title matches what’s written in the content I’ll tend to stay on till the end because its the title that got me clicking.
Related post is another good reason for me hanging around a site for more information.
I heard of another blogger saying, he moved his google analytical script to the top instead of the usual at the bottom, that way his report shows very low bounce rate. That’s a personal choice of his, at least he love what the figure shows. :)
It looks strange to me moving analytics code towards the top of page will help improve our bounce rate
.-= Anil Gupta´s last blog ..List of 50 Blogs that accept guest blogging =-.
It doesn’t reduce bounce rate at all Anil, it just that this made the owner feels better when looking at the stats or perhaps there are other reasons in doing this that I don’t see.
The quality of your post is still king, or it’s invisible!
#element321 – there are plugins for doing that!
Typing comment again with correct Name Field :-) These tips are nice to decrease the bounce rate and to increase the browsing and conversions. Sometimes more bounce rate is good when people are bouncing away by click on your ads or affiliate links. But usually this does not happen.
.-= imran@earn money online´s last blog ..Earn Money In Easy Way Now =-.
Cool tips; i really didn’t know that about reducing the wordpress blog bounce rate. Nice post!
.-= Viju Dallon´s last blog ..Web2Mayhem Review – Unbiased Critical Review of Web2Mayhem to Dominating Search Engines! =-.
As a reader, there are few situation that make me quit the website/blog right away. One of it is relevancy. Even if the content is useful but if it’s not relevant to what I am looking for on that time, it will be useless for me as well.
Thanks for sharing! :-)
Blog conversion completely depends upon the bouncing rate, I also recently change my blogger template and the new template load very fast than before.
.-= chandan@work at home jobs´s last blog ..Make money blogging take time =-.
In my opinion, create a Post series is also a great way to decrease bounce rate of our blog.
.-= Dana @ Blogging Tips Blog´s last blog ..How To Create Blog Logo Easily by Using GIMP #3 =-.