How to avoid a high bounce rate on your blog

The term "bounce" refers to a visit which results in no further clicks on that site. In other words, the visitor came, saw and bounced. Depending on the type of page you have created, this can be an ok thing or it can be terrible.

Generally speaking, a blogger doesn't want a high bounce rate, (s)he wants visitors to drop in, find stuff they're interested in and carry on reading. Hopefully, somewhere along the line that visitor will sign up for the newsletter, follow them on twitter, buy something, or generate revenue in some other way.

The longer you can keep eyeballs on a page, the more likely it is you will convert that visit in some way. Converted visitors are therefore far more valuable than visitors that bounce and never return, obviously.

The tried and trusted method to stop people from bouncing is to provide super interesting, relevant and valuable content. But often, visitors are skim reading and may not really be that into whatever it is your article is discussing at that point in time. It's not your fault that they're not really reading what you've written, but you do need to give them options to find other stuff they may be more interested in on your site.

That last point is critical. People want to find exactly what they are looking for. If they find it on your site, then you get the kudos and recognition for supplying that info. If, on the other hand, they find your article, don't really get what they want and go back to Google, you've lost out. You didn't meet their need. In fact, you only got in their way because they wasted time skimming your content without getting what they were after.

To counter this effect, it is really important that you take the trouble to reference other related posts on your blog from within the content. Don't add links for the sake of it, but where appropriate, take the time to do this. Make sure it is very clear why you are referencing other posts and what the reader can expect to find on them.

A good example of this is the blog post entitled "Great ways to gain publicity for your blog", which lists five unique and innovative ways to publicize a blog.
These links are internal references that fit neatly and organically into the flow of the content for that particular post. The reader might well be interested in looking at those posts with a view to learning about how to write blog posts for competitions.

All the top bloggers use this technique. Take a look at the recent blog post at Daily Blog Tips entitled "Reduce Your Bounce Rate In One Second". It's easy to see how the writer cleverly integrates other related posts, making it very easy for you and I as the reader to start browsing the blog instead of "bouncing".

This "internal referencing" practice, over time, helps to build up a rich tapestry of interconnected posts on your site. A skim reader might see links that (s)he is interested in and start navigating around your blog, instead of returning to Google to find another result. While the original article may not have contained exactly what the visitor wanted, other posts may and by making it easy for the visitor to hop from one post to another you retain their time and attention.