Posts Tagged ‘bounce rate’
Why setting your own website as a default browser page can be a bad thing
Are you sabotaging your website by increasing your own bounce rate?
Many business professionals set their own website to their home page when they open a new browser. However, this can cause problems with your sites’ ranking.
One of the factors major search engines consider when deciding the popularity of your website is based on “bounce” rate. Bounce rate is determined by the number of people who visit your website (either directly or by clicking through a link to your site) and then leave before looking at any other pages.
Another important statistic search engines may consider is how long people stay on your website – you may get more “points” for visitors that stay longer than 30 seconds than for those who click a few pages and leave in 30 seconds or less. This quick viewing behavior may indicate to search engines matching queries for your website that it is not such a good match after all.
It is fine, and actually can be a good thing to set your website as the default site to load when you open a browser because it can increase traffic count, which can help convince search engines your site is popular and contains information people are taking the time to read. However, to avoid creating artificially high bounce rates:
- Click through to at least one other page (3-5 pages would be even better). If there are parts of your site you want to rank a little higher, click through to those pages first; and
- Stay on your own website for more than 30 seconds (1 minute would be even better) before exiting the site.
If you want to increase your competitors’ bounce rate – have all your employees set their home page to the competitions’ website and bounce away in less than 10 seconds every time you open a browser. (Note: We are not recommending you do this — it is not a nice thing to do, it will not help your own site, and is not a substitute for quality SEO and SEM.)
