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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.
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32 Discussions
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
Nice thoughts to decrease bounce rate and the biggest point could be just have some good content in your blog and thats it , your blog’s bounce rate is reduced
Surely, it’s your blog content that plays the vital role when it comes about engagement on our blog.
Anil Gupta´s last blog ..List of 50 Blogs that accept guest blogging
I think that having links in your post to other posts in your blog is also a good bounce rate deacreser. Great tips.
WebTechWise´s last blog ..Using Akismet? Check Your Spam Box for Legitimate Comments
Yes, whenever possible try to work in some links to previous posts or to post categories on your blog. You want to make it very clear to your readers that you have more related information that they may be interested in.
Using excerpts is the best way in Googles eyes also. What many bloggers, especially beginners don’t realize is, a full frontal article turns the single post page into duplicate content on a single domain…the worst duplicate content there is according to Google.
Just be sure the way you do excerpts doesn’t affect your full feed…assuming you use a full feed as all should.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..DEDC Remains DoFollow – BUT…
I’m also using post excerpts as wa y to improve my blog bounce rate and that surely help me improve my blog bounce rate to some extent at least.
Anil Gupta´s last blog ..List of 50 Blogs that accept guest blogging
i do use related post plugin and linkwithin plugin to display other posts on my blog.
having a blog landing page or excepts is very effective
mk akan´s last blog ..How Too Many Backlinks can Increase Your Bounce Rate
One of the most important things affecting bounce rate is the physical appearance of your website/blog. If someone lands on your blog and it has an ugly theme, there is a good chance that person won’t stick around. The same goes for blogs with too many ads or ads that are too intrusive. First impressions happen before the user reads any of your content. So be sure to take full advantage of that and give them what they are looking for.
Speaking of getting what you’re looking for, your traffic quality really affects bounce rates too. If your post titles are misleading or you don’t stay focused, people may leave right away when they can’t find what they are looking for.
These are all great tips, particularly the use of excerpts on the front page and the use of links within your posts to send readers to other posts. Since bounce rate has become such an important metric, it behooves you to do anything and everything you can to keep people clicking around your site.
Hey Lee,
Using excerpts is really a cure to the bounce rate ailment. You were right at the point that excerpts creates curiosity. And this curiosity is the key to the longer hold for the readers on a blog.
Thanks for mentioning other key points too.
While excerpts may lower your bounce rate, in my opinion it creates a weaker visitor experience. I would only implement this if your blogposts really were too long to include on your homepage in its entirety. If not, all you are doing is padding stats at the expense of your visitors.
This post had some really helpful tips on reducing bounce rate. A few things I’ve found that works is to add some tutorials, posts with comparisons, and a section in the sidebar that shows you’re most popular posts.
Making your blog easy to navigate and almost showing off your best posts will help new visitors explore your blog quicker and easier. This will hopefully keep your bounce rate lower.
Mathew Day´s last blog ..Wanna get your Competitor’s Backlinks?
Amazing stuff
thank you so much for sharing the informative article.
Srivathsan G.K´s last blog ..Website Speed Determines Google Rankings – How to Solve it ?
Related post plugin does help to reduce the bounce rate.
Jayce´s last blog ..Download TTPlayer 千千静听 latest version 5.6.3
Thanks for explaining what is the effect of having a high bounce rate. What I did was i install some rating plugins and YARP plugin for wordpress
My blogs bounce rate is around 40% – 50% Is it good or satisfactory ?
Blogging Tips´s last blog ..Make your Wordpress blog secure !
@Blogging Tips,
That’s considered good already, it means that most of the visitors view your blog not less than 1 page before clicking the big “X” button.
Thanks Lee for the explanation
is there other way how can i check my bounce rate aside from using google analytics?
Yes that is a pretty good bounce rate already. 50% and below is not bad, but it depends on the niche. For some niches average bounce rates may be quite different.
To check bounce rates you have to rely on analytic software installed on your website. It is not the kind of stat that you can find reliable stats for on 3rd party websites.
Nice tips. Personally I don’t like related post. I don’t know why. maybe because it looks messy in blog.