Your bounce rate is the peercentage of your visitors that arrive either through search, or from another incoming link, view the page they landed on, and leave without looking at anything else. Depending on the type of site you run, a high bounce rate can be a sign that your visitors just aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they come to your site. If your bounce rate seems high, or if it’s on the rise, there are a few things you can do to bring it back down.

Keywords

If your visitors are coming in from search engines, and then leaving immediately, you might have some faulty keywords on your site. Take a look at the search terms that are bringing the visitors to your site, and make sure those terms are directly related to the content on the page that search engines are taking people to. Also, do a little research, and make sure that your keywords don’t have a dual meaning. For example, it’s possible for a band, and a movie to share a name. If your site is about the movie, it’s possible that people searching for the band are arriving at your site by accident. If that’s the case, try to refocus your content to talk more specifically about the meaning of the search term that applies to your site.

Load Times

If your bounce rate is going up, take a look at your website, and make sure that all the pages are loading quickly, and properly in all the major web browsers. If your visitors find a broken page, or a page that’s loading slowly, they’ll be more likely to leave your site before exploring it.

Content

Your visitors might also be leaving quickly because your content isn’t what they were looking for. Your content might not answer their question, or provide them with the information they were looking for in the first place. If your visitors find your content lacking in some way, they’ll eave your site without looking at any other pages.

Make sure your site has high quality content, appropriate keywords, and make sure it works properly, and your bounce rate will stay low. If those things don’t help, it’s possible that the type of site you’re running just has a high average bounce rate. Otherwise, you should be looking at a low bounce rate if you keep these tips in mind.

Creating SEO optimized content is important to online success. Including keywords relevant to your site in your content helps search engines to index, and rank your website so people can find you. You also have to remember that you’re writing your content to be read by your visitors as well.

When it comes to writing SEO friendly content, quality is more important than quantity. In other words, try to stick to a few well written, keyword rich pages than a lot of poorly written pages that just hammer keywords. The goal of any website is to make money. You need visitors to either buy your product, or click your ads in order to make money. If your content is confusing, or hard to understand, your visitors will lose trust in your site very quickly, and as a result, they won’t buy your products or click your ads – they’ll just leave your site without looking back. In other words, a high search rank means nothing if it’s paired with an equally high bounce rate.

Your writing can’t just be keyword heavy, it also has to keep your readers’ attention. One way to both emphasize your keywords, and keep your readers engaged is to use bold words. By using bold test, you’re drawing the reader’s eye to the text, and search engines also give more weight to bold text. So, by highlighting text in bold, you are ensuring that your readers will pay closer attention to it, and search engines will give it more weight.

If you are planning to include pictures in your content, make sure to use them effectively for SEO purposes. Include a caption for each picture, and make sure you give each file a strong name that describes what’s in the picture well. One thing a lot of people overlook when adding pictures to their content is the alt tags. In your code, the alt tags give you a place to put a description of the image that will pop up when the image is moused over. That text might not be immediately apparent to the reader, but search engines use it to help rank both the page, and the image for search purposes.

Creating quality content requires a balance of elements that readers are going to find useful, and elements that a search engine is going to find useful. If you can learn to walk that line, you will create content that is both attractive to readers, and SEO friendly.