You’ve checked your site stats and you are getting TONS of hits (visitors) but you are wondering why no one is signing up for your newsletter or making a purchase?  It’s time to look at your Bounce Rate or how long your visitors are actually staying on your site.

Google Analytics definition is: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

For the mathematically inclined, here is a formula:

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits

A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not finding information that is relevant or interesting TO THEM on your landing page.  Note the “TO THEM.”  You may think your home page is very relevant and interesting but you need to think like your visitor.  The more compelling your landing page is to them the longer they will explore your site and increase the chance that they will become a customer. 

Here are a some tips to help improve your bounce rate and your conversion.

1-  Check your keywords.  Your keywords must be relevant to what you are offering.  For example, if someone is searching for information on choosing a paint color for their bedroom and lands on your fine art site because one of your key words is paint, they are not going to stay.  And they are not your target client.  So evaluate your keywords to be sure you are receiving targeted traffic.

2-  Keep your page short.  The most relevant information should be “above the fold.”  (You should see it without scrolling down.)  People generally have short attention spans and with so much information coming at them from all directions on the internet, they will generally do a quick scan for the information they are looking for.  If you don’t grab them during that scan, they are on to the next site.  All relevant links and your call to action should be above the fold.

3-  Evaluate the Layout of your site. When a visitor lands on your page, where does their eye go?  This is the first information they see.  Is it information they need? Is it a call to action?

I recently found a good tool to help evaluate a site’s layout.  AttentionWizard.com takes a screen shot of your site and creates a “heat map” of where your visitor’s eye is drawn.  Their description: ”AttentionWizard uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to simulate human visual processing and attention.” It gives you some interesting insight, it’s quick and free. Try it out.

4-  Keep your landing page fresh.  Search engines spiders like to find new food!  If you have fresh content on your home page, they are more likely to favor you in their search.  If you are a regular blogger, and this means at least twice a week, one way to do this is to make your blog your landing page.  What?! Radical?! That’s usually the response I get when I suggest it.  When I heard the idea, I had my doubts too.  But I decided to try it with my site and six months later my bounce rate is 25% lower!

There are many other things to look at concerning bounce rate and conversion.  But short of writing a book, these are a few things to get you started.  It can actually be fun.  If you have a question, or just don’t want to deal with it all and would like me to take a look at your site, contact me.

If you tweet and don’t have the Twitter Hanbook, you are missing out!  Here’s the latest update about Twitter Lists: Twitter Handbook.

Owning, running and maintaining an Internet based business or a site needs articles. Plain and simple, every one who has a site knows this. Even those who don’t have sites but are frequent Internet users knows this as well. 

Articles quench the thirst for information and knowledge of the people. Plus, the articles provide many other benefits for the site. The benefits that articles provide are putting a site high in the ranking in search results of keywords and keyword phrases that pertains or are relevant to his or her site. 

They also provide attraction to website visitors when they are appreciated and is linked to your site from another site or newsletter. Articles provide for the increase of the confidence and trust levels of customers to your site and company. 

Many articles are also beneficial to both company and its traffic. When the readers like the articles, they would tell more of their friends, family and peers and recommend your site to them, providing for a larger volume of traffic. You get bigger sales if your traffic trusts and believes in you. Your product or services would be much easier to sell when they know you know what you are doing and talking about. 

So ok, we have established that articles are very important to a site and to business. Articles are crucial and to keep ahead in the game, a site must have an article, it is imperative. There is one dilemma though, not many people like writing articles. 

Many website owners would rather spend their time on something else, and unless you’re a big time company, you don’t have the necessary resources to use on a pool of article writers. Plagiarism or copying of other articles is frowned upon and could easily get you into trouble, worst case scenario; a hefty fine and jail time. 

So what are the other options? 

Well, for starters if you hate writing articles and you can’t afford to hire people to write for you then don’t. Get free articles. The first place to look at for free articles is the public domain.  Here you won’t have problems with copyright infringement and the following penalties and fines if you get caught for plagiarism. 

Public domain articles are articles freely given to the public for public use. You can do whatever you want with it. You can place it on your site, name it as yours, put it in a newsletter its you decision. Always remember though that you will have to choose articles that is very relevant to your site. 

The downside to public domain articles is that since it is free for everybody, many of your competitors may have access to them as well. Since every site needs to be original and unique even though you have the same niche, this could be a predicament. You may also have to edit them a bit to place more keywords and keyword phrases to make them better. 

Another way to get free articles is to allow other sites which has the same subject or topic as yours to submit articles to your site. 

This would be only to augment your existing content or else all your articles would be leading to other sites since these articles would have resource boxes with them that could link or direct the readers to their site. That’s why it is important to have your own articles; you cold use them to link your site to other sites as well. 

Tip: to truly feel the impact of what a good article to you, go for original ones. There are many article writers who do part time and freelance article writing jobs that charges only minimal fees. You can get good articles that have all the keywords and keyword phrases you need and people are looking for. 

The investment you made for these articles would be worthwhile because you could use them for all the benefits you could offer. You hold copyrights to them and you will be able to use them anyway you want. 

As your articles help you in building your business and your site, you will have more articles to write and maybe then you wont be having second thoughts about articles.