Who else has noticed that the time spent on their website after someone has searched using certain keywords has improved their SEO performance for that set of keywords?
I've noticed that on my blog..it helps to further optimize once you see wwhat's working. Although these days I don't worry about keywords quite as much, I just focus on delivering great content.
Infact Google and other search engines gauge the relevance and quality of a website from the average amount of time a visitor spends on a webpage after landing there via a search query. So it is good to know if it is happening.
Time on site and bounce rate, as well as other key user interaction metrics are teaming up with social media action to become the new measure of a sites usefulness and popularity. I expect these factors to become more and more important over the coming years. The days of inbound links are numbered in my opinion. And it kinda makes sense if you think about it...what better way to judge how useful a site is than to listen to what people think about it and measure how they interact with the site?
Don't think the days of inbound links are numbered, but bounce rate is now a factor and I can see it becoming more and more important. Like Mattsbackpack said its a great indication of how relevant and useful a site is.
Of course, there are many factors in SEO and one is maintaining your bounce rate, it would also help in SEO, there is no doubt to it really.