Comments on: Quick Google Analytics Tip: Analyze Bounce Rate Correlated with Time on Site/Page

By: Jennifer Sanderson

Jennifer Sanderson — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:49:08 +0000

I am working on the SEO of a website that has a high bounce rate but over 1 minute avg. time on site. How do external links affect the bounce rate? The site has prominent links to manufacturer websites on the home page. Should I be worried about a high bounce rate on this site?

By: Jeannette Paladino

Jeannette Paladino — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:06:29 +0000

Toma and Eric — thanks for your commenst on YARRP. I know it’s essential to have links within your blog. I’m trying to do more of that, but it needs to be relevant to the content.

By: Toma

Toma — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:33:40 +0000

Thank you Eric for your comment. I truly appreciate your time to share your opinions with us. Great suggestions.

I’ve seen a video with Matt Cutts from Google and he received a question about the influence of any Google Analytic metric on rankings. The answer was that Google doesn’t uses any of the website’s metrics to influence its rankings.

Will check out the link you provided for sure.

Thanks again!

By: Eric Goldman

Eric Goldman — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:07:14 +0000

Toma;
By the way, in case you would all like to see an example of this, we just posted the first in a new series we’re writing called, “SEO Campaign Management: Survival Guide”. This first post is called, “Designing an SEO-friendly website from the ground up”. You can see how it all works by visiting: http://bit.ly/SEOSurvival

By: Eric Goldman

Eric Goldman — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:01:36 +0000

Toma;
Great article with much useful advice. I would add just one thought to the mix: Google appears these days to be using the Bounce Rate, or BR, to influence where it lists your site on its Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS. Doesn’t seem fair in some ways, but it is in most respects (from Google’s perspective), so we had better all get used to this. For those of with active blogs, the BR is, as Toma said, usually higher because people come to read a post and leave. So you must do something about it as Toma and Jeanette suggest.
We use a combination of three ideas to help reduce BR.
1) Point people to the top index instead of to the post itself. You can only use this one if the post you are bringing to their attention is near the top of the index, of course. If it’s below “the fold”, then we…
2) Point them to a newly created Landing Page which houses a few other related posts. Better than using YARP (the plugin Jeannette mentioned), as on this page you can cram a bunch of keywords to enhance your SEO acore while gathering the posts to form a series,
3) Placing links on all of our posts to try and link people into content on the rest of the site as Toma suggested.
Hope this helps.

By: Toma

Toma — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 07:18:46 +0000

Thank you Steve for your comment and observation. Appreciated!

Thank you Jeannette for the plugin suggestion. I’m also using something similar but for me it didn’t helped that much. I find that links placed inside text content can help a lot more.

By: Jeannette Paladino

Jeannette Paladino — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:04:55 +0000

A plug-in for WordPress called “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” will also list other articles/blogs on the topic at the bottom of the post with links to the other articles. So this is another way to get readers to go to other pages.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:14:43 +0000

Thanks Toma this article has great suggestions and I like the fact that you linked it to other material that goes into greater depth.
Steve