Analyzing website performance has a big learning curve. Most of us quickly grasp the importance of unique, frequently updated material, attractive headlines and interacting with users. One aspect of web performance that can be confusing is bounce rates. Let’s take a look at bounce rages and why they are important.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Any “rate” is by definition a percentage. “Bounce rate” represents the percentage of visitors who arrive at your landing page, then leave without interacting or clicking on another page within your site. You can find bounce rates through your analytics tool. Most web masters use Google Analytics for this.

The Google definition of a bounce rate is “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.”

Why You Should Fix Bounce Rates

So a low bounce rate means you are attracting visitors who are looking for what you have to offer. Put yourself in the place of a visitor who finds what they were looking for on the first try. How much more likely is that person to recommend your site to others? It seems logical that a low bounce rate will help spread the word about your site and that you are doing a good job with inbound marketing. If your bounce rate is over 60%, something is wrong with the way you are attracting visitors.

How to Reduce Bounce Rates

The main aspects of your site that must be addressed to reduce bounce rates include page titles, engaging graphics, loading time and site navigation. In order to optimize these aspects you also need to understand testing.

Page Titles

The page title is the phrase shown in the tab of your browser when you visit a page. Because most of us are on WordPress, I’ll use this program as an example. Depending on the template you use, the page title may show the title of your blog and then list the name of the post, or it can list the post name first. You will want your carefully crafted post title to be used by the search engine, so edit your template to show the post title first.

To do this, you must edit the header.php file. For newbies, I recommend copying and pasting your header.php file to a text document before editing so you can always revert to the old file if you mess it up too badly. Here’s what it looks like:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if 	
( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> 	
<?php wp_title(); ?></title>	

Just switch it around to look like this:

<title><?php wp_title(' '); ?><?php if	
(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo '--'; } ?><?	
php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

Making Headlines

There’s no point to editing your page title unless your headline makes visitors want to click on the title and then continue reading your post. Copyblogger does a better job of educating about headlines than I ever will, so I’ll just refer you to the following articles:

How to Write Magnetic Headlines
13 Emotion-Based Headlines That Work
Writing Headlines That Get Results

Catching Attention

It may not seem obvious to you when you are browsing a website, but a good photo catches attention. Bounce rates drop significantly when photos, videos and screen shots are used. You can get images free at several sites. Read this post for more info.

Reduce Loading Time

If your page takes too long to load, few visitors will stick around to wait. You should also know that Google tests your page load time too when determining what to show in search results. If you are serious about your website, make sure you get a dedicated IP so that your page is not sharing resources with others, slowing it down. You should also examine the number of elements on the page that might be causing problems for you.

This site will really open your eyes as to how the graphics, widgets and other page elements are slowing down load times! Don’t give too much attention to the times listed, since it talks about every single element loaded on the page. Most users can get to where they are going before the page is fully loaded. According to the report, by reducing page elements, I could increase my time by 9.6 seconds. I’ll be working on that later today!

Improved Navigation

It is important to take a step back from your site navigation and put yourself in the position of a new user. For instance, it seemed obvious to me that the “job hunting” link would lead to links for new telecommute writing job listings: not so much to other visitors. That is why I am adding a link in a prominent spot for those coming to find job postings, since that is my number one visitor attraction.

Once you begin tweaking your site for bounce rates, you’ll find more visitors come, stay and enjoy. This may mean a dramatic improvement in subscribers, advertising revenue and many other little ways you monetize your site.