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?

If you are doing any sort of business online you will know the importance of keywords. Especially if you want to be found on the top of The Google God.

Keywords are those words or phrases that your target audience will be inputting into the search engines looking for your business. In order for them to find your business and not your competitor’s, you want to know how to use those keywords to maximum advantage.

Your first priority has to be to know which keywords your audience are actually using. There is no point in trying to second guess your audience. Just because you think they are typing in ‘home business’ doesn’t mean that the majority of them are. They could be typing ‘online business’ or ‘work from home’ or any one of a zillion other keywords or phrases.

You need to research what keywords are being input to the search engines. You then need to research what the competition is for those keywords. Sometimes it is easier and cheaper to go after keywords that don’t generate quite as many searches but ultimately have less competition.

Remember, the aim is for people to find your business at the top of their results. If you target highly competitive keywords, you limit your chances of success. Unless you are a super SEO sleuth! And with the way the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, this is a hard market to play with.

Never try to go after a keyword without doing your research. You will waste a lot of valuable time at best, and if you are using ppc advertising, you will also be throwing away a lot of valuable money.

So how do you research the best keywords?

There are loads of tools and services out there, but to be honest, the most popular is a free little service by Digitalpoint Solutions. I have added a keyword search link to their site at the bottom of my blog here. Remember, this is entirely free. You can use it or not. But the difference it will make to your marketing efforts is tremendous.

As with everything else related to your online business, you have to put in the groundwork if you want to be successful. You don’t have to pay for everything, but you do have to use the tools available. Don’t kid yourself that the top guru’s simply sit back and watch the money come rolling in. They work at it. Same as you and me.

For the lazy folks out there who cannot be bothered to scroll to the bottom of the blog (shame on you!), here is the link.

table> To Your Success Susan Coils

Get Suggestions For Phrase: Brought to you by Digital Point Solutions