Hello, for some reason, my website, http://www.newtuts.com, has a high bounce rate of almost 70%. I cant find out why either. Ive been tweaking titles, descriptions, sitemaps, etc, and according to Google Analytics, the bounce rate has already dropped by 14%, but I cant get it to drop anymore. Can someone take a look at my site, and see why there is such a high bounce rate? What am I doing wrong? I would be happy to allow Analytics access if need be. Thanks!
Your page is absent any text content? Your "assuming" that visitors know the usefulness and/or worthiness of the material links your attempting to provide?
Im not quite sure what you mean by "absent any text content", but yes, I assume that the people who are finding my site know what it can be used for. Especially if they are finding it through a search engine. Even my most popular tutorial that I wrote, http://newtuts.com/read_tutorial.php?id=31 has a bounce rate of 82%. The average bounce rate from Google is 88%, and some of the keywords that are giving me those bounce rates seem perfect for the pages being found. For instance, if you searched "how to embed video in powerpoint " in Google, my page listed above would show up, and I am getting a 100% bounce rate for that combination of keyword/content. I cant see why as they match perfectly. Any other ideas?
A bounce means that the visitor came in, read the tutorial and left without clicking on anything else. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it: you need to do a task such as embedding a youtube video and find a good tutorial on it via google. You read it, possibly bookmark it (I do that so I don't have to search again if I forget) embed your video and leave. For the record, I also have a tutorial site and have the same "problem". It's not a real problem, no matter what the so called SEO experts tell you. My tutorial site is on page 1-2 in google in a very competitive niche with a bounce rate of over 80%, and has been for a year.
Oh, I never thought about that. I thought Bounce rate was the percentage of people that visited a page and then immediately left. Also, what is the % Exit? And can you tell me what your website is that you were reffering to?
Your webhosts stats may provide "an average number of pages viewed" by each visitor. BTW, your understanding of "bounce rate" and pitagora's explanation is not all that far apart. Your understanding just dismisses "effect", which is "actual bounce rate".