Make more of your More tag.
June 20th, 2010
We are still trying to get to the bottom of the recent Google ‘Mayday Mayhem’ algorithm change. But it seems like one of the factors which is receiving more emphasis is the Bounce Rate.
So what is Bounce Rate?
Well in the simplest terms it is the amount of traffic that visits your site and either leaves immediately or just reads one page without then clicking onto another page or post on your site. Googles own definition is “The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).“
It’s not clear from Google what it considers to be an acceptable bounce rate, but whatever yours is, you should make an effort to improve it.
The first thing that you need to do is dive over to Google Analytics and examine your bounce rates. (If you’re not using GA then I suggest you start. The information it provides is much more accurate than that supplied from within your C-panel.)
As I mentioned, it isn’t clear where the line between good bounce rate and bad bounce rate fall. But the nearer your rate is to 100% the worse it is. It is widely believed that a good bounce rate for your homepage is anything below 30%
I noticed on this blog NetBenefits that the bounce rate for my home page was around 78%. Not good!
But, when I looked at the page, and tried to see it through the eyes of a visitor, it soon became apparent why the bounce rate was so high.
Whenever I created a new post I had my blog set to show the entire post on the home page as well as the post page. Even worse from a bounce rate point of view, I was showing in their entirety the last 5 blog posts.
So when a visitor landed on my home page, they could get all of the information they had searched for without having to explore the rest of my site.
Fixing this was pretty simple.
The first thing I did was edit the last few articles and improve the internal linking within the post, making referrals back to older blog posts, for instance in this post I am linking to this REALLY interesting post about some free software that everyone should have! Ok, that isn’t particularly relevant, but it does demonstrate the point. Have a look through your old posts and look for something which is related to your new post and then link back to it.
The next thing I did was look for a suitable point in the post to add a MORE tag. This will create a break point so that instead of posting the entire article to your home page it will show an extract.
By carefully choosing where to put the MORE tag you can entice readers to click on the link to read the rest of the article. I try to look for a point in the post which is immediately before I reveal an interesting feature or secret etc. As an example, on this post I left the reader (hopefully) wanting to know that a good bounce rate is probably below 30% by putting my break after the word below. This means that to find out what that figure is, they HAVE to click the ‘Read more’ link.
By making these two simple changes, I have seen my bounce rate drop from 78% right down to 37.88%, still not brilliant, but certainly a step in the right direction.
If your sites have plummeted following the Mayday Mayhem then check out you own bounce rates and look at improving them.
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Posted in Google Help, Odd Stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else. | 
Tags: Bounce Rate, Google Mayday, Mayday Mayhem, More tag
