How do you know that you have a successful blog?
When your readers are drawn to it like bees to honey, stay longer, read more, and reduce your bounce rate while they are at it.
What is the bounce rate, one might ask?
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visitors Viewing One Page : Total Number of Visits
Why does it matter to your blog?
Simply put, bounce rate measures the quality of your blog from the readers’ point of view. The more compelling your pages, the longer visitors will stay on your site and CONVERT.
Thus, it’s extremely important to reduce your bounce rate as much as possible.
And here are some tips to do just that.
Let’s start with the most basic/self-explanatory/overlooked ways.
1 - Tagline: Make sure you have a tagline giving visitors an idea what your blog is all about. If they don’t see it right away, they might leave thinking that this site might not relate to what they are looking for. A good place for that is your header.
2 - Keywords: Yes, the all-important keywords… Optimize for the wrong ones and your bounce rate will go through the roof, since your search engine traffic will not find what they are looking for.
3 - Good Layout and Design: The look of your blog can make your visitors leave or stay. Stick with a clean, profession, uncluttered design. Many recommended Thesis theme for better bounce rate – for these exact reasons
4 - Great Title: An intriguing title will always reduce blog bounce rate by cultivating reader curiosity.
5 - Improve Your Site's Loading Speed: Nobody wants to be kept waiting, and that includes your site’s visitors. Don’t test their patience by making them wait for your whole site to finish loading. One common cause of slow page loads is having way too much widgets or plugins installed in your site. You could say that having too many widgets is almost as wrong as having too much ads on a website; one annoys the visitors while the other makes them wait.
6 - Focus On SEO Traffic: high search ranking optimization for the right keywords will always bring floods of TARGETED traffic that wants to read what you have to offer.
7 - Comparing: Compare the page which gets lower bounce rate with the page that gets higher. Ask your friends and other fellow bloggers the difference between them. This one helps a lot
8 - Remove Autoplay Videos: This is my opinion. I’ll close the site immediately if it starts singing. Remove the video altogether, or at least have it paused.
9 - Optimize 404 Page: Many blogs have ugly 404 error page. That makes the bounce rate to bounce more. Your visitors will leave your site and look elsewhere for the information they were looking for. So optimize the error page. Provide some solutions and suggestions there.
10 - Optimize The Sidebar: Remove all those useless and time consuming widgets from your site’s sidebar and try to include widgets such as “Popular Posts” and “Recent Articles”. You can also use “tag cloud” in the sidebar.