How do you track visits to your website or blog? If you are are using Google Analytics you might be familiar with the term Bounce Rate. But what is Bounce Rate? The Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a single-page and then bounce from your site. If you have 1000 visitors on your site and 200 visit other pages on your site besides the home page, your Bounce Rate would be 80 percent. That’s because 800 of those visitors hit just your home page and then bounced. The lower the bounce rate the better you are doing at keeping visitors on your website. Which should help improve other site stats and keep readers coming back. So how does one lower a sites bounce rate? That’s something I’ve been trying to master myself with some success. Below are some tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years. Eye-Catching Headlines Write catchy headlines that will draw in your readers and get them to click and then read your post. You want to get them off your home page and reading the meat of your site. Don’t Give Away The Farm The home page shouldn’t have full articles or you risk the reader bouncing. Just give enough information to entice them to clicking on a post so they go further into your site. There are tons of WordPress themes set-up to display part of the article and then display a link to read more. Find Reliable Hosting Don’t give your visitors an excuse to leave by having a slow site. Look for reliable hosting and keep your site running at top speeds. Related Post Plug-ins are a great tool to help keep your site bounce rate down. Related Posts will find and display a list of similar post. Think of it as walking your readers through your website. Great SEO Bring the right kind of people to your website with optimized pages. If you page is optimized for your subject matter the less chances a new visitor will bounce. Check out the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin and optimize your site. Remember to fine tune as you go since search engine rankings are always changing. Please feel free to comment below or leave any suggestions you have.
10 must have WordPress Plugins
Being the most popular blogging platform in the world has its advantages. There are millions of individuals and businesses that are using a WordPress blog. Those blogs are the stepping stones to promoting a business or a cause. Plugins make those blogs even more powerful and there are over 10,000 to choose from. The best thing is they are all free and install in just minutes! We’ll cover some of the best plugins out there that make your blog more attractive to search engines, one that let you send a newsletter and others that will keep your readers on your site longer and some get you “Liked” on Facebook. All in One SEO Pack If you don’t have this plugin installed you should download it today. It is the most downloaded plugin for WordPress blogs. This plugin is used to assist in the search engine optimization of your WordPress blog. Installation only takes a moment and set-up is fairly simple. Find more information here on how to use it once you have the plugin installed. Akismet This plugin prevents spam from being posted to the comments section of your post. The plugin checks your comments against the Akismet server to see if they look like spam. The “Comments”" admin screen lets you review spam comments before they display below your post. Contact Form 7 Those looking for a way to gather customer information need to look no further. The plugin Contact Form 7 uses CAPTCHA in order to prevent non-humans from submitting a form. This plugin even uses Akismet to filter out any spam. It can help you manage multiple contact forms and is customizable for those with a little more experience with code. Contextual Related Posts Keep your readers around longer with a plugin that displays related stories. This plugin will display a list of related post at the end of the post the reader is viewing. The plugin looks at the tags or the current article to match it with similar post the reader might like. Therefore keeping them around longer on your site instead of reading one article and moving on. fbLikeButton Let your readers “Recommend” or “Like” your blog post and share them with one-click to their Facebook friends. The plugin is customizable in look and feel depending on your blogs theme. The button can be displayed before or after your post. This is a great way to draw traffic to your blog from Facebook. Google Analytics for WordPress This plugin bills itself as the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Track where your readers are coming from, how long they are staying around on your blog and more. The newest version promises to be faster when loading the tracking code. Newsletter Keep your readers coming back to your blog with a newsletter you compose. It can be sent out on whatever frequency you like. Your readers can opt-in to your newsletter with just a name and email address. This is a very powerful plugin and you can read more information here. WP-DB-Backup Must have plugin to give you piece of mind that your hard work is protected. This plugin is able to backup your core WordPress database on a schedule or when ever you need. You can save it to the server, your PC or have it sent via email to protect your blog post. It also allows you to backup other tables that are related to your WordPress blog. WP Google-buzz Facebook and Twitter still reign when it comes to social media sites. Google might be the powerful search giant but its entry into social media with Google Buzz kind of fizzled. However there is rumor that Google has something new coming down the pipeline. WPtouch iPhone Theme Give your blog that iPhone look and feel for your readers on the go. WPtouch gives your WordPress blog an iPod/iPhone app look. The admin controls for the plug-in give you lots of customization. Viewer can toggle to the normal view for your blog with a flip of a switch. More information”¦ More Resources: WordPress Plugin Directory Affordable WordPress Hosting from GreenHostUSA ““ Starting at less than $10 a month!