Blog design plays a very important part in keeping your visitors stay on your blog for a longer time that is why I recommend you to keep your template as neat as possible. In my today’s article I am going to tell you how you can decrease your blog’s bounce rate so as to keep your readers busy in your blog. Let me define bounce rate first :
In websites, bounce rate is defined as percentage of visitors that bounces to some other site rather than continue on to other pages of the same site. Wikipedia
OK, now coming to the topic, to increase page views it is must you’ve a lower bounce rate. Below are some tips you must follow in order to reduce bounce rate. Lets start :
Content
The most important factor that counts is what content is their in your blog. If the user finds your content useful he/she will definitely navigate to other pages of your site and if the first impression is bad, then you’ve to work hard writing good content. Content really matters. Refer to this post of mine, where I’ve given some tips on writing a superb blog post.
Template Design
As told in my previous articles also, keep your template as neat as possible, your template should :
- not have too much of ads
- not have useless sidebar badges
- be fast loading
Also read my tutorial on why my blog design sucks.
Say no to Pop-up Advertisements
I’ve seen some bloggers uses a pop-up box that asks for subscribing to their blog. I do not recommend it at all. If you’ve good content your readers will automatically subscribe to your blog. If you want you can place subscription box at the end of every post.
Magazine style home page
90% of the readers that comes to your blog always visits home page, so your home page must have enough content to keep the readers busy. I recommend using a magazine style home page. It displays maximum content in minimum space. This is the reason I’m also using the magazine style home page.
Create an Archive page
It is must to have an archive page in your blog, it includes the list of all the posts category wise as well as monthly wise. If you’ve an archive page your readers can easily browse all your articles through one page. One of the best way to show all your articles and also make Google happy. If you want to create an archive page, use this plugin called Clean Archives Reloaded.
Adsense ads
It is recommended not to keep Adsense ads in between the articles. Though it will generate good money but there exists a chance that user can switch to other site. So, be careful!
Interlink your articles
As told before, Interlinking is a very good habit, while writing a post, interlink it with some other related article using a proper keyword, in this way user will navigate to that article rather than pressing Ctrl+W. Read more about interlinking here.
Related Articles
It is the most common method to decrease bounce rate. You can display related articles on single.php page after any post ends. To show related posts you can use a plugin called YARPP.
Recent articles and recent comments
In my last I told you how to make most out of your sidebar, there I told the importance of displaying recent articles and comments in sidebar. You can also add this widget in your sidebar to decrease bounce rate.
Popular articles
Everyone likes to read what is popular, so it is must to have a popular post widget in sidebar to reduce bounce rate.
Next post/Previous post
In thesis theme, there is a default option to display next and previous post below comment box. I really like this feature, if your theme does not have this option, no problem, I’ll tell you.
Open single.php file and paste the following code whee you want to display next/previous posts, I recommend beneath comment box.
Tag to display previous post
<?php previous_post(); ?>
Tag to display next post
<?php next_post(); ?>
I am sure by following these tips, you will surely decrease your blog bounce rate. Try it once and share your views with me.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
nice one , i liked the previos next tags , will use it in my theme
Content is the king, content is really the key to reduce bounce rate. Most of the time we provide a title not relevant to the content just to improve our search engine ranking.
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