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How to reduce bounce rate on your blog and improve SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:41:38 +0000

Reduce Bounce Rate

High bounce rate hurts your SEO

When a visitor sent to your blog or website by a search engine bounces, it means that he did not find what he was looking for at your blog or website.

The search engine views this as a vote against your site, and pushes your blog or website down on its SERPs!

(Image source)

(Check out “Reduce the bounce rate, improve your SEO” for more details on this)

How to reduce the bounce rate

There are a few simple things that you can do in order to reduce the bounce rate.

The question that needs to be asked is: Why do visitors bounce? It can be because:

They did not find what they were looking for
They found what they were looking for, but still didn’t see any other page or post

Well, there isn’t much you can do for the first. At times, your blog or website can come up in the SERPs for irrelevant searches.

(For example, my post “Keyword density – What is right, what is wrong” often comes up in the SERPs for the search term “What is right what is wrong”. Now clearly, this post is irrelevant for the people searching for this term – and they mostly bounce)

But there are some things you can do for the second category of people.

1. Have meaningful internal linking of posts

The idea here is to have various means of highlighting the content of your blog to the visitors.

Maybe you can have a list of related posts at the bottom of each post, or you can have a “people who liked this post also liked” type of list.

This way, your readers would come to know about other content of your blog or website without having to search for it.

This would increase the chances of them reading more than just one post or page on your site, and therefore, decrease your bounce rate.

To know more about different ways of highlighting your content, please read “7 ways to implement internal linking of your posts for better SEO“.

2. Have a welcome message for visitors

Now this is a little extra that you can have for your search engine visitors.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could present a customized message to the visitors from search engines, and highlight your best posts there?

The good news is that you can! You can show a message specifically to search engine visitors, and list your best posts there. Or, you can list posts that are relevant to the search terms used by the visitor!

There are many plugins available for this for various blogging platforms.

What not to do to reduce the bounce rate

We saw the ways of reducing the bounce rate – using these techniques, you can decrease the bounce rate meaningfully.

However, many people try to reduce the bounce rate artificially. Some examples:

“Click for more” or “Read more” links (on pages other than archive pages)
Posts broken into multiple pages, each page containing just a few paragraphs

If at all, these methods would artificially decrease your bounce rate. However, it is more likely that visitors would get annoyed by this, and would never come back!

My advise – stay away from these, and employ only genuine ways of reducing your bounce rate.

Boost your SEO efforts – Have keywords in the link Anchor Text

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:45:54 +0000

Links do the job…

External links and internal links are very important from an SEO point of view.

These links make Google and other search engine spiders visit your blog, and thus, help your blog get indexed.

Apart from this, the links are treated as a vote of confidence from the linking blog or website, and your ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs) gets a boost due to this.

…but make them work harder

Yes, links do the job. But they can do a lot more than that!

Simply having links point to your blog or blog posts is enough in itself. But if you use the most appropriate words in the anchor text of your links, the links would become a lot more valuable!

Search engines like Google not only look at the number of links to your blog, but also at the anchor text of the link. To use our “vote” analogy, it means that Google treats a link as a vote for your blog for the words used in the anchor text.

That is, Google thinks that the linking website or blog finds your blog relevant for the words found in the anchor text. And if the linking site finds your blog relevant, searchers would too, right?

And that’s why Google ranks your blog higher for these terms!

Use keywords in the link’s Anchor Text

What words do you think are the most relevant for your blog? Your keywords!!

And your goal is to make Google and other search engines believe that your blog is the most relevant blog or site for your keywords.

Therefore, make sure that you use your keywords in the anchor text of your links – it is a sure shot way of improving your search engine ranking for your chosen keywords!

Backlinks and Internal Links

Getting your keywords in backlinks from other blogs and websites is more difficult – after all, some other webmaster controls these backlinks, and you might not have the liberty to specify the anchor text!

So, start with using keywords in your blog’s internal links – it is easy, and can be done immediately!

What is “Anchor Text”?

For those who are new to link building, anchor text is the text that you click in a hyperlink.

Thus, “Blog SEO Expert – SEO for Blogs” is the anchor text in the following link:

Blog SEO Expert – SEO for Blogs

7 ways to implement internal linking of your posts for better SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:28:05 +0000

The Basics – Links and SEO

Links are very important from SEO point of view – this includes both external links and internal links.

Of the two, internal links are far easier to implement, as you have total control over them.

The question is: How should you implement your internal linking strategy for getting best SEO results?

Here are some ways.

1. “Most Recent Posts” in the sidebar

You can have a list of 5 or 10 most recent posts in your sidebar. A “most recent posts” list would highlight the freshest content of your blog to your readers.

When placed in a sidebar, this list would be available site-wide. This means that even when readers come directly to a post from a search engine (instead of coming to your blog’s homepage), they can see this list.

Many widgets, gadgets and plugins are available for most blogging platforms (like WordPress, Blogger, etc) for implementing the “Most Recent Posts” list.

2. “Most Popular Posts” in the sidebar

The “Most Popular Posts” list shows the most viewed posts in order of their popularity. Thus, this list highlights the best posts of your blog as judged by their page views.

Again, when placed in a sidebar, it would be available site-wide. Also, many widgets, gadgets and plugins are available for most blogging platforms for implementing the “Most Popular Posts” list.

3. “Best of” list in the sidebar

The “Best of” list is very similar to the “Most Popular Posts” list – it highlights the best posts of your blog. The only difference is that instead of displaying the best posts as judged by the page views, it displays the best posts as judged by you!

Thus, you can highlight the posts that you believe are your best – even when they haven’t got a chance to be popular!

Again, when placed in a sidebar, this list would be available site-wide.

The “Best of” list can be easily implemented using any HTML widget or plugin available for your blogging platform.

4. Linking to related posts from within a post

When you write a post, you might mention something about which you have written in detail in another post. This is the best opportunity for you to link to that post!

These links would appear only in individual posts, so they wouldn’t be visible site wide. However, they appear where the reader has his most attention – in the content. So, they are highly likely to be clicked!

5. “Related Posts” at the end of each post

Another great idea for internal linking is to have “Related Posts” or “Related Links” below each post. This list can show a list of posts that are similar to the current post.

The end of a post is a place where readers pause and think about their next course of action, so it is a good idea to present a “related posts” list there. If readers have liked your post, they would naturally like to read posts that are similar to the one they just read!

Most blogging platforms have some plugin or widget through which you can automate the generation of this list.

6. Showing list of best posts to new visitors

Showing a list of most recent or most popular posts in the sidebar is a great idea. However, it has some limitations.

It is in the sidebar, not in the main content area – in the center of the page. So, the reader focus is not 100% there.
These lists are more relevant for new visitors, not for regular readers of your blog. It is better if only new users are targeted.

Therefore, it is advisable to have a list of your best posts shown specifically to new visitors to your blog, or to visitors coming from a search engine like Google.

Most blogging platforms have a plugin or widget available using which you can show customized messages to people coming from different places like search engines, social media sites, etc.

Use these tools, and present a list of your best posts to new visitors to your blog.

7. Others – Archives, Tag Cloud, etc.

Apart from these, there are other traditional ways of providing internal links to your posts. For example, there are various archives like:

Date-wise archives
Category archives
Author archives, etc

You have links to your posts through these archives. Links are also created to individual posts through the use of a tag-cloud.

Improve SEO of your blog by linking blog posts internally

Blog SEO Expert — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:46:38 +0000

Importance of Links

Modern search engines like Google give a lot of importance to links. This is because Google treats a link as a vote of confidence for your content – something is linked to only because it is worth linking to!

Therefore, more the links, better is the treatment of your blog by Google in its search engine result pages (SERPs)!

External Links or Backlinks

Links can be classified into two categories.

The first is External links or Backlinks – these are links from other blogs or websites. Please read “Backlinks – The fastest way to good SEO” for more on this.

Internal Links

The other category of links is Internal Links – these are the links from one part of your blog to another.

Internal links are not as important as external links in the eyes of search engines, but they are important nonetheless!

Let’s look at the advantages of internal links.

Advantages of Internal Links

Total control: Internal links are easy to generate – you have complete control over what you write on your blog, so you can easily create a link to one of your blog posts! External links are much more difficult to get.
Apart from direct SEO benefits, internal links provide your readers a great way to navigate around your blog. This improvement in the user experience also ultimately improves your SEO.
When you provide internal links to your readers, they tend to visit more posts, making them spend more time on your blog. Thus, internal links improve the stickiness of your blog, again resulting in better SEO.
When readers go to many pages on your blog, it increases your pageviews. This means increased advertisement revenue for you!

Want to know how you can achieve internal linking of your posts? Check out “7 ways to implement internal linking of your posts for better SEO“.