You’ve worked extremely hard for months and have finally achieved first page positions in the search results for many of your important keywords, yet you’re still not happy with your site’s bounce rate. What could be wrong?  

Let’s first start out with a few definitions.  A bounce is a single page visit.  A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that arrive at one page and exit the site before viewing another page.  So the real question is not what is a bounce rate, but rather, what can I do to improve (decrease) my site’s bounce rate?

The first thing you should do is to check the coding of your site. Have all of your pages been tagged with the proper tracking code?  If not, this could be the problem. If only your homepage is tagged, your Analytics account will not be able to account for any other page views on the website.

Is the website’s design or usability a factor?  We all know about the importance of first impressions.  The same applies to your website. The presentation and design of the site can affect the bounce rate. Are the pages cluttered or do irritating pop-ups appear when a visitor arrives to the site?  Is there an intuitive navigation that enables someone to easily find what he or she is looking for? Take the time to address these questions and ensure that the design and navigation options are not creating obstacles, preventing your visitors from viewing other pages.

Do the page titles and descriptions correspond to the content on the page? Throughout the optimization process, you have crafted meta data so that the titles and descriptions are compelling and keyword-rich, but if the content on the page does not match up with those titles and description tags, you will be setting your pages up for failure.  Make sure that the titles and descriptions for all of your pages describe the content accurately.

The search engines have advanced algorithms and do a decent job of providing searchers relevant results.  However, if you have optimized pages for keywords that aren’t what the searcher is expecting to find, you are going to have a difficult time keeping the visitor on your site. Taking the time to conduct keyword research is crucial. All of the pages on the site need to be optimized for precisely what they are about. There are often variations of keywords that would make sense to optimize the content of a page around, and this is where keyword research is most important.

While there’s not a magic number that is good or bad, it’s never too late to review the above items to ensure that you’re providing the best experience for the visitor, which can reduce the bounce rate. It’s essential to know your visitors, why they are arriving to your site, and what they are looking for once they get there.

Now that Bing has arrived, hopefully you’ve at least checked it out. Bing certainly has a visual appeal, providing beautiful background images and tidbits of interesting information as you move your mouse around the landscape.

After all of the hype around MSN’s new search engine, I wanted to share with you some of the information that has been circulating as a result of an eye tracking study comparing Google and Bing. The full study can be found here, but below are a few of the main points.

• Google and Bing do not differ in terms of the amount of time searchers spend looking at the organic results.  In this particular study, participants looked at the organic search results an average of 7 seconds.
• The attention given to sponsored links located above the organic results is high for both Google and Bing. More than 90% of participants looked in that area during each search.  Sponsored links on the right, however, attracted more attention on Bing (about 42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (about 25% of participants per search).
• Another difference between the two is the related searches feature. Bing offers their related searches on the left, while Google’s are below the organic search results near the bottom of the page. As a result of the location, Bing’s related searches had greater visibility than Google’s related searches.  Bing’s attracted the attention of 31% of participants per search. Google’s attracted the attention of only 5% of participants per search.

One question that I have been asked frequently is - will Bing affect search engine optimization (SEO)?  My thought is that it’s highly unlikely. Although Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s search results vary, Google is still likely to remain on top.  Google has an incredibly strong brand and searchers seem to be at least fairly happy with the results that are provided.  Google’s strong brand and searcher’s satisfaction with the results (for the most part) will likely keep other competitors at bay for a while. After all, people Google things. Will we soon Bing things? 

One critical component of search engine optimization (SEO) is building links to your website.  These links can be called “inbound links” or “backlinks”.  Although one of the most tedious component of SEO, link building can be the determining factor in having your website position on page one versus page two. It can be what enables you to be differentiated from your competition, possibly even moving your site above theirs in the search results.

To build quality links to your website and to utilize your time most effectively while doing so, it is important to note that not all links to your website are perceived as being equal to the search engines. The SEO value or “link juice” that is passed to your site from a link can be determined by many factors. Below are a few things to look for when establishing a link building program:

Are the links nofollow?
A link that is nofollow is essentially telling the search engines: “Don’t follow this specific link.” This is an HTML attribute that enables webmasters to tell the search engines to not transfer “link juice” (PageRank or anchor text) from these links. The search engine will still technically follow the link.

There a few ways to identify if links are “nofollow”.  First, you can take a look at the page’s source code to see if the nofollow tag (rel=”nofollow”) exists.  Another easy way to determine if a link is nofollow is to install a tool such as the SEO for Firefox plugin. With this, the nofollow links will be highlighted in red.

Does the link come from a page that is restricted in the robots.txt file?
A robots.txt file is uploaded to the root of a website’s domain to tell the search engines to not crawl specific pages on the site.  Therefore, as the search engine will not crawl these pages, links from them will not pass any “link juice” or SEO value to the destination page. 

Redirects can also keep that valuable SEO “link juice” from being transferred through a link. 301 redirects are the most SEO friendly way to tell the search engines that a change of address has occurred for a particular page.  If the page that contains the link is 302 redirected (temporary redirect), the links from this page will not be followed.  There are a few tools out there that can help you to determine how a web page is redirecting and this is one that I use frequently: Rex Swain HTTP Viewer.

There are other things that can prevent “link juice” to be passed from another site to yours, but hopefully these will help to identify the most obvious ones.