What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors of your site which leave your site from the very page they arrived at without visiting any other page. The more the bounce rate is, the more worst the case is.
Consider that you get 1000 unique visitors each day, and if your bounce rate is 100% then you get only 1000 page views as all your visitors bounced away right from page they arrived without navigating to any other pages.
So this is important to improve the bounce rate of your website to get more page views at the end of the day. Bounce rate in entertainment websites, news websites are always very good. On the other hand, sites like tips and tricks, solution to specific problem, tutorial sites do not generally get better bounce rate as readers on this website generally arrive with a problem in mind and they take solution and leave it to apply the solution. But this is just a general scenario.
8 Easy Tips to Improve Bounce Rate or Increase Page Views Per Visitor
1. Next Post / Must Read:
At the end of the post put a heading like ‘Next Read’, ‘Must Read’ etc. and put link to at least 3 directly or closely related post to the post you are writing. So that if the reader gets to the end of the post s/he will notice the links and possibly will click them, if the next post is an extension to this post or creates enough curiosity or interest in the readers mind to check them out.
2. Topic Break Down:
Break down or split up a topic to create multiple posts and then crate another summery or index post from where you link to all those posts, so finally you get multiple posts published. Reader will obviously click on those links from the index post ultimately generating multiple page views from each of your readers, which we want.
For example, in a post where I was writing about 5 Best Ad Management Tips for Google Adsense, I wrote elaborately about each of the tips in 5 different posts and then wrote the index post and linked those 5 posts from this index post. I shared the index post all over the social sites, readers came to the index post, then they moved around to all those posts finally generating more page views.
Note: Please do not do this, if you don’t think each of those tips deserve a separate post. I mean, if the complete post is not a huge one when merged then there is no need to split it up to several posts. Like some people do this with 1 photo in each post, so much disgusting.
3. Multi-Part Post:
This is quite like the Topic Break Down method but here there is no multiple point of breaking down a topic. Consider a post which is so very long like 3000 words in it. Here you should think about breaking it down to multiple posts, but without any index or summer post. Here you use pagination. For example you can write 3 posts each with 1000 words instead of a very long post of 3000 words. At the end of each part, you should keep links like followings:
- At the end of the first part, keep a link to the next part
- At the end of the last part, keep a link to the first part and the previous part
- At the end of all other parts keep a link to the first part and the previous part and the next part
Alternatively, you can use a complete pagination like [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] so that the reader can see how many parts are there and can skip to any part. I think this is better user experence
4. Inline Link:
This one is very useful and it really works like a charm. Whenever you are writing a post, find out the the text or topic in your post on which you might have written a separate post earlier. For all those texts or topic, link each of them to their related post. So when users are reading your post and will find those links they will probably click on them to read more.
5. Related Content Widget:
This is also very effective, if the user reads your article to the end and then find something like ‘Recommended Articles For You …’ or heading like this which inspires the reader to another post which is related to this post.
6. Mentioning Posts:
I found this working great. You can try mentioning a post directly which you have written earlier and which should be read by your reader before reading this one, or just simply because the reader should not miss it. I would recommend to mention at most 2 posts. For example, when I was writing the post How to find and block low paying ad networks in google adsense, I mentioned another post at the beginning like this “In our last tutorial we knew that we can find and block less profitable and inappropriate ad categories and specific ads for our blog, so now lets see how to find and block low-paying ad networks in google adsense.”
7. Open Links in New Tabs:
As I have been telling you about linking your contents in so many ways to other contents on your blogs, the thing is, try to use target=”_blank” attribute in your links so that, when clicked, the links open in a new tab.
8. Use sidebars:
Most of the blogs have 1 or 2 sidebars. Use these sidebars to list down content categories and contents like Top Posts, Recent Post etc. So as the reader will be reading the post, the sidebar contents will be visible and will increase the probability for user to click on the links.
Okay, so I hope that you will give these a try to find out the effectiveness. However, one thing is very important which is website’s speed. Why? Because, people wouldn’t navigate around much if it takes them a lot time. Read the following tutorials to speed up your website