Of course you’re using Google Analytics to analyse traffic to your site, aren’t you! And you are checking the Analytics report regularly.

But, do you know what the reported “Bounce Rate” means?

It’s quite simple really, but also very telling… the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who only read the page that they saw when they arrived at your site. In other words, a bounce rate of 56.4% means that 56 out of each 100 visitors to your site do not click on any links on your site!

What’s a “good” bouce rate? Well our client sites experience bounce rates of between 45 and 85% But even if your site is at the higher end of the range, a good bounce rate for your site is one which is lower that it was last week.

To Do…

Here are a few ideas which you could adopt to improve your site’s bounce rate.

• Make sure that in-text links are obviously links. One school of thought suggests that links should always be displayed in blue, because that is the default used by simple sites for many years now.

• Make sure that links are “active”. By this I mean that when hovered over, a link changes characteristics (becomes underlined, bold, changes colour etc)

• Make sure that your links have a tool tip. If this is so, you’ll see that little box with details of the link when hovered over. Ideally, the tool tip should provide your visitor with an incentive to click on the link.

• Place links in close proximity to where your visitor will be looking. A good example of this would be to arrange the visual flow for a shopping cart content as
  1. image
  2. description
  3. price
  4. order now button

• Break up menus into small logical groups of links with headings.

• Make sure that each visual element of your page has a clear indication of the next step that you want your visitor to take.

Action Plan …

Set yourself a target to reduce your site’s Bounce Rate by testing a change each week.

• create a short, obvious URL for a commonly referenced page
• create 2 differnet URLs which resolve to the same actual page so that you can compare the effectiveness of an advertising or other promotion campaign
• correct a spelling mistake
• migration of a previously static page into your Joomla content
• make a often used URL unforgettable (eg you might often refer visitors who raise questions to an FAQ area, wouldn’t it be easier to send them to http://mydomain.com/faq?)

Anyway, whatever your reason, it’s easy to do.

There is an effective, simple Joomla Component which makes redirection URLs possible. Download it from here

Install it (or have your Webmaster install it for you) and then watch the short Video Tutorial on how to set up redirections the painless way.

Don’t forget that the author of the component (Adam van Dongen) accepts donations for his work. We recommend that you make a donation, particularly if you use his Component on a commercial site,

It is often useful to find other sites which are related to one which is of interest to you. In particular, you should be aware of what sites are considered to be related to your own site(s). If you know what sites are related to yours you’ll have an understanding of the types of sites which are linking to your site.

You can easily find related sites by using Google. For example, to find sites related to this site, I would enter related:www.ebiz4results.com as a Google search phrase.

Armed with this information you can refine your development of inbound links, and gain a greater understanding of the nature or context, of your visitors.

In the early days of the Internet virtually all site URLs were preceeded by “www” — even today many casual users of the Internet will add the www to a URL, perhaps believing that this designates the “World Wide Web”.

However, most modern sites make the prefix optional. For example, both http://www.ebiz4results.com and http://ebiz4results.com are valid URLs for this site.

The main upside of this flexibility is that potential visitors will arrive at your site regardless of how they type your URL into your browser. Another advantage is that the “abbreviated” URL takes up less space in printed material and is much easier to say!

On the other hand there is a potential downside to the dual URL. This is that some search engines might consider the shorter and longer links to be different pages when indexing. This means that your search engine ranking will be lower than necessary — a definite disadvantage if you are trying to maximise your site’s traffic from “organic” search engine listings.

What you need to do…

Firstly, the absolute minimum is to make sure that both the long and short forms of your URL are operational. This is easily tested by typing each into the location bar of your browser and making sure that each takes you to your home page. If either URL results in an error, it is most unlikely that you will be able to make the required configuration change yourself. So you should immediately ask your Webmaster or ISP to correct the position.

Secondly, if your site’s search engine ranking is important — if it isn’t, you should be seriously questioning why you have a site at all! — you need to decide whether you want the short or long URL to be the standard.

The choice is generally one of personal preference. But, if your site is relatively mature you should probably Google one of your primary keyword phrases and check if the Google link to your site uses the short or long form and adopt the result as your standard.

Then ask your ISP or Webmaster to configure your server to “rewrite” the non-standard URL to the standard URL, and designate the change as permanent. Feel free to refer them to this article if the need more information!

To see what I mean, click on this link… http://ebiz4results.com and look at the address in your browser’s location bar… You’ll see that, even though you entered the short URL, your browser has taken you to the full URL, including the “www”.

HowTo force long URL’s

Forcing a long URL (ie all links to your site include the “www” in the URL) is simple with an Apache server…

• make sure that mod_rewrite is installed
• add the following to the site’s top level .htaccess file, replacing “domain.com” with your own domain name

  Options +FollowSymlinks
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{http_host} ^domain.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

HowTo force short URLs

The equivalent .htaccess entry is…

  Options +FollowSymlinks
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.domain.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You can see this in action at http://www.nigelball.org

Notes

1. The .htaccess file is simply a text file with the filename .htaccess, and it should be stored at the root directory of your site.
2. Be careful when editing .htaccess — wrongly inserted commands may break your site altogether — if in doubt, seek professional assistance!
3. If you are using a CMS such as Joomla, or blogging software, such as Wordpress, you should also check the software configuration to set the site URL to the preferred form.

To get indexed on the search engines, and to improve your search engine ranking your site needs links from external sites to your pages. While you can just hope that other site owners will link to your pages, the results are unpredictable, and may never happen.

But this problem can be solved extremely easily.

How can you get easy, fast links to your site? Go to LinkMetro.com and either sign up for a free account and manually exchange links with over 20,000 other websites listed in very tightly themed categories OR upgrade to an Advanced membership where you can get links even quicker and easier.

Start now my exchanging links to existing pages and whenever you add new content, add “linking” to your checklist. If you would like help with this, give me a call, or use the Contact Us page.