If you’ve looked at your stats you may have noticed something called bounce rates. Now, you probably never thought they were anything important. Well, they are.

A bounce is when a visitor comes to your site and leaves, either by closing their browser, clicking the back button or moving on to a new site without going to a second page on your site. This may not seem very important but, if you have a 70% bounce rate then that means 70% of your visitors are leaving your site without having a look at more than one page, which obviously isn’t very good.

Obviously there is very little chance of you getting a 0% bounce rate but there are a few things you can do to keep it down.

First of all, dont clutter your page with ads too much, if a person comes to your site and they cant clearly see the page title and content they were looking for or if the page is full of ads or unrelated text then they are pretty likely to bit back on their browser.

Make it easy for users to navigate around your site. Content rich sites are good, but dont make your navigation & logo so minimal that people can find them.

Make sure the content is the first part of your site that people see. This part is pretty similar to the first point but it is important! If people have to look for your content they will most probablt just leave.

Finally, and this could be just me but I hate sites that have big, flashing or noisy ads, especially ones that make noise or play videos automatically. If anything like that happens I’d click the back button as quick as I can and find what I was looking for on another site!

The last thing I wanted to mention is social bookmarking sites. If you are advertising your site through any sort of social bookmarking site such as Digg then you pretty much just have to accept that you will have a higher than average bounce rate. This is because the Digg user will probably have seen your article and thought “I’ll read that!” then read it and headed on over back to Digg for more articles. There’s not a lot you can do about it, but if you follow my tips above you might be able to get your overall bounce rate down.