Money Secrets

Hands up if you include your site’s ‘bounce rate’ as part of your overall SEO strategy? I have to own up here to not previously giving it much thought. And for those who don’t know what ‘bounce rate’ is, it’s basically the percentage of visitors who leave your site from the same page they entered it, (single page visit).

And of course blogs are different anyway. New visitors may search through the site to see what’s in store, but those who return regularly (like you, ) probably only come to read the latest post and then move on.

Would the search engines take account of this for blogs? Or would they still see it as negative black mark against your site? Hmmm.

Personally I look at it like this. If you’re looking at optimising your site to improve your rankings then there’s no doubt that one of the easiest ways to do it is to improve your content. Search engines love content. But they especially love new, relevant, useful content. (Well, they don’t, they’re robots and I’m not too sure if robots have the ability to love as yet!) But their customers do and they like to please their customers.

If the visitor to your site doesn’t like your content they’ll leave without bothering to look any further. The more of them that leave, the higher your bounce rate.

Now as to whether the search engines include that bounce rate in their little algorithms and whether it affects your rankings I have no idea. Hopefully, you SEO geeks out there will point me in the right direction.

But whether the search engines consider it or not, you as a site owner certainly should. Because it comes down to giving your visitors what they want. If you don’t, they’re gone. And there’s a good chance they’re going to end up on your competition’s site instead.

Tweak your meta tags all you want. Get all the inbound links you can get. But if your visitor doesn’t like what they see when they arrive, what good has it done you?