Bounce rate is used in website traffic analysis to represent the percentage of visitors who come to your site and immediately leave without visiting any of the inside pages. Everyone wants this number to be as low as possible because we want our visitors to stay longer on our website.

How do you know what your bounce rate is? The simplest way is register for a free Google Analytics account, list your site and paste some HTML code on your pages. Analytics will you provide free in-depth reports.

Some web analytic software (just like Google Analytics) helps you to find out what bounce rate should be considered as normal. For static websites anything under 40% and for a blog or websites with lots of outbound links from 50% to 60% should be normal.

Is your bounce rate higher than it should be? I’ll show you 5 ways to lower it.

1. Provide good content
   Maybe the most important. Many of us put too much time and energy into the design of the site and not enough into writing effectively. Not giving the surfers what they are looking for is the best way to get them to leave your site immediately. Content is king!
2. Make sure your website loads quickly
   You have seconds to grab your visitors’ attention. It’s really important to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. Optimize your site – don’t use too many or heavy images or Flash. Choose a reliable host.
3. Make your pages easily available
   Keep your navigation simple, clean, easily readable and user-friendly. Make sure your site is easy to use and well-organized. If your visitors can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they will leave your site. Surfers are impatient. They need information right now.
   Make sure you use the same menu on the whole website and provide an easy way to get back to your home page. This might sound like a no-brainer, but many folks get it wrong.
4. Use internal links
   Give people internal links (links that are pointing to other pages of your website) that will lead them to other pages of your site. Make sure you are linking to other pages that are relevant to the page you are linking from.
   Using good anchor text will help you. Let your anchor texts grab your visitors’ interest and let them dive further into your content. Never use click here – nobody will see it.
5. Take note of traffic sources
   Where is the majority of your traffic coming from? Direct links, search engines, social networking sites? The quality of the traffic will contribute the overall bounce rate being higher or lower. The more targeted your traffic is, the lower your bounce rate. Focus on traffic source that convert better.

Bounce rate is an important measure of your website’s effectiveness. There are also people who believe it plays a role in how search engines rank your site. If it is true it gives you some extra motivation in working on improving it.

If your site has been loosing visitors as fast as they enter, it’s time to make the necessary modifications on your site and then give it a few weeks to see the difference. The difference should be that your visitors will be staying on your website for longer periods of time. Run tests to see if it improves over time.

Are you using Google Analytics? What is your bounce rate? Are you satisfied with it? Do you know how people interacting with your website?

Now you know how to get your website indexed within 24 hours. It’s time to let search engines know about the other pages. The more pages get picked up by them, the better.

How can you help them to spot your whole site? Here are 5 tips:

1. Make your pages accessible.
   Each and every page should have at least one link pointing to it. You can write great articles and you can provide interesting, unique contents – if there is no link, nobody will find it. Make sure your pages are easily accessible. Link from your homepage to the pages to get your entire website crawled faster.
2. Create a sitemap.
   You can create a sitemap that contains links to every page of your site. Place a link to your sitemap page from the homepage. This map can also help your visitors to get familiar with your site.
3. Avoid variables in the URLs.
   Search engines don’t like variables in URLs (like http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?var1=somevars&var2=854). It’s a fact. They don’t index all of this kind of pages if any. You can easily get rid of them with mod rewrite. You can also make your URLs search engine and user friendly.
4. Use internal links.
   The more ways search engines can find your pages, the better. If you’re blogging, you can always link back to your previous posts. It helps Google locate your post and bring more traffic to that post. Internal links can also reduce the number of visitors who leave your site immediately after reading your page. Use them to lower your bounce rate.
5. Get links to the deep pages.
   Everybody knows we need inbound or incoming links from other websites. If an incoming link is not pointing to the home page but another page that is deeper in your site, it helps search engines to discover that page.

   It’s the so called deep linking. When you build links for your site, try to get links that point to different pages and not just to your home page. Don’t forget to use good anchor texts when deep linking.

Google doesn’t index all of your pages (maybe 50-70% of it). The 5 tips above can help you increase the amount of the indexed ones. Always make sure the spiders can find your site from different places.

Let me know if any of the above helped you to increase the number of your pages listed in search engines. Do you know any other technique? Just leave a comment.