How can I reduce my bounce rate?

A lot of my visitors come from search engine, and my stats tell me that based on their search strings, they should find my site interesting.

But 75% of people spend less than 5 seconds on the site.

What techniques can I use to improve this?

(Note, site is 1st link in sig)

 

I think the major reason is that your site takes a lot of time to load. In fact, It took me around 10 seconds to load your site on a high speed broadband connection. Remember, not all your visitors have high speed internet; majority are still on dial up. When it takes long to load a site, people get frustrated and just press the back button.

I recommend you to optimize your site to load faster and see your bounce rate decrease.

 

You need a little more content up top for people too read and maybe make that random picture thing just a bit smaller.

 

Simple layout, helps you to reduce the bonus rate, and add quality content...

 

Yes i think loading time has a bit to do with it

 

It took me about 6 seconds to load the site on a 3mbps DSL account. Use google analytics to see what connection most of your traffic is using.

 

Yeah loading time is fairly slow, also your site is about many different things, try and specialize a bit more. I would ditch the dark feel to the site and go for a lighter approach.

Change the sides to white so it feels more open, change the dark header for a lighter one and describe below the title of the website how the site will benefit the visitor.

The First thing a visitor wants to know is exactly how your site will benefit them.

 

1. I have a ultra fast connection, so your page load is pathetically slow (as others have mentioned).

2. Different niches have different bounce rates. Do you have any idea what your bounce rate should be?

3. That huge graphic at page load puts me off right away, it takes up half the page. I want information when I go to a site, NOT flash!

 

You can find some sorta thing like "Related Post" add-on so members or visitors will stay longer at your site

 

Keep your website visitors for longer by giving them something to do, like participate in a forum or blog discussion, always ask questions if it's a blog or provide other means of interaction, like a naked dance on youtube....

 

Are you visitors targeted or a your buying traffic? If your visitors are not targeted with the right keywords, chances are they will not stay on the page too long....

 

Along with what others have said, give them multiple ways to navigate your site: lists, images, maps, whatever. People navigate differently, give them as many options as you can.

 

you can have the latest post or most popular post on the homepage itself. So that people have something to read.

 

Make some nice attractive headline in your content to get people to stay a little longer..

 

Yeah, visitors would usually drop sites that loads too long.

 

I hate it when a site takes too long to load i would try and reduce that as soon as you can.

kind regards


sam
X

 

I've sped it up a little, hopefully it's better now, but I have 10mb internet so it's hard to tell!

I've also lightened it but the logo is not final, I'll make it look prettier soon!

As for the main graphic, it's kind of irrelavent, as 90% of visitors hit an article page first.

I see some contradicting info here. Putting more links and junk will slow the site down and screw up SEO. Putting less makes people bored. Which is best?!

Anyway, Thanks for the tips.

 

its still slow on me.. and the welcoming image is not too welcoming for me.. looks like an ad.. put important contents above.

regarding the links, people want to click and click. so more link is good but too much of everything is not..

 

Use a streamlined theme so it loads fast, use descriptive titles for your articles, offer a range of categories for people to browse through, add a picture gallery, add a video section, install a forum,,,,,,

A lot of it depends on "what" your users are looking for. Some people are looking for blogs, some people are looking for forums, some are looking for videos, images,,,,,,. So try to target the groups you want to visit your site. And then incorporate keywords into your post to attract those people.

 

Your site should be well-designed and have a convenient structure.