SEO Tips and Tricks

Bounce Rate: How It Can Affect Your Website and SEO?

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Bounce Rate: How It Can Affect Your Website and SEO? | Is it good or bad to have a high bounce rate?Bounce rate is calculated upon the total number of visitors for a certain period of time divided with the visitors that leave the website and never return. In this article, you will find out how bounce rate can affect your website and SEO. We will also show you some examples of bounce rates for different type of websites.

How Bounce Rate Can Affect Your Website and SEO

What Kind Of Bounce Rate That Is Good For Your Website?

As mentioned before, the bounce rate depends very much on the type of website you have. For example, if you have a landing page with a call to action such as subscription form or add to cart button, most likely the bounce rate will be around 90%, because the majority of visitors will leave the page in a way or other (hitting the back button or making the purchase) and only few visitors will return to your page later. News portals and content websites can have lower bounce rates around 30%, because users tend to come back again and again to look for new information. This infographic designed by Kissmetrics is a very good presentation of bounce rate for different website types and industries.

Should you be concerned about high bounce rate? Should you bother trying to improve the bounce rate of your site? Well, you should definitely do something about it. For instance, you are running a blog about web design inspiration that receives 1000 hits per month. You bounce rate for this website is 80%, which means that 80% of your visitors (800 people) come to your page, get the information they need and never come back. From this you can already conclude that a lower bounce rate is what you should achieve. High bounce rate can be caused by lot of things: your users are unhappy with your website look (if you are having the same design for years and do not upgrading it to latest standards it can be a problem), the content is not as good as visitors expect (short, irrelevant content can also cause high bouncing), the website is hard to navigate (missing navigation or broken links will lead the user to leave your page). You should consider fixing, reworking your website and make it user friendly.

A high bounce ratio can also greatly affect your SEO work. Google is built in such way to detect how much time users spend on your website and can also calculates the bounce rate. A high bounce rate will tell Google that your website does not provide value, it has low quality content, and users do not like it. So, there is no reason to give as much importance to your site, listing it lower on the search results.

How To Decrease Bounce Rate Of Your Website?

The first thing you should do to decrease the bounce rate is to install Google Analytics to your website. This is a free tool provided by Google that will tell you exactly how people are using your website, how much time they spend on it and what is the exact bounce ratio. Once you have enough information, and you understand visitor’s behavior and you know exactly who your audience is, you can make the necessary changes to your website.

Improving navigation, design, speed, adding more valuable and informative content can greatly reduce the bounce. While around 50% or web users will use a smart phone or a table to navigate on the internet, you should consider making your website responsive.

As you can see, bounce ratio can be decreased easily if you know how to do it. As the web evolves, users may have different needs while searching for information, so most likely methods that worked in the past are not working anymore, so websites should also evolve and adapt to satisfy the visitor. Whatever the design or the content is causing the high bounce rate, you should urgently take action and make the necessary changes to keep your website interesting providing value to the user. This way you will not only convert new visitors into leads but your old users will also check back frequently, keeping the bounce at low level. Hopefully this article helped you to consider working on the bounce rate of your site and you understood how important is to keep it at a very low ratio.

SEO Tips – How Boost Your Joomla Site Ranking?

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How Boost Your Joomla Site Ranking? | Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of a website’s development process, as it provides valuable info to both search engines and visitors of a website. Joomla, as a complete Content Management System, features most of the settings you will need to optimize, in order to achieve better Google rankings. In this article, we will share some tips about how to boost your Joomla site ranking.

SEO Tips - How Boost Your Joomla Site Ranking?

How Boost Your Joomla Site Ranking

Tips 1 – Enable Search Engine Friendly URLs

This option is enabled by default on a Joomla installation, but it can be tweaked even further by enabling URL rewriting. To enable URL rewriting you will have to rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess (mind the dot before the filename). With this option enabled your website’s URLs will not contain the ‘index.php’ part, thus making them more user-friendly, therefore more search-engine-friendly. You may also enable “adds suffix to URLs”, an option that will add a .html suffix to all your website’s pages. There is an ongoing discussion whether this option will enhance your website’s SEO, but we prefer to keep it enabled.

Tips 3  – Use your aliases effectively

This is a feature that is often being disregarded by most new Joomla users. In fact, the alias is used as the url for each article, hence it will have to contain the article’s title, with all spaces replaced by dashes. You should never leave an article’s alias empty, as Joomla will autocomplete it with the article’s publication date and time – certainly not a very user-friendly information. Further more, if you create a menu item for an article this will override the article’s alias, so you will need to set the menu item’s alias accordingly.

Tips 4 – Use your page titles effectively

Page titles are a major factor for a website’s SEO, hence you will need to define them with care, making sure they include your main keywords. Again, pay extra attention to menu items, as their page title settings override the article’s page title. This is a very important step, especially for your website’s homepage title – it certainly has to be something more specific than “Home”.

Tips 5 – Do not forget the meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are not visible to your website’s visitors – unless they are proficient source code readers. But still, search engines consider them as an important factor for your website’s ranking, as meta descriptions provide valuable information for your website’s content. Actually, a meta description is the text appearing beneath the link of your website on search engine result pages. You should use this setting to gain an advantage for your desired keywords.

Tips 6 – Avoid duplicate entries for your category items

Search engines do not like duplicate entries – especially as meta descriptions. In the case of a category, you should avoid setting a generic meta description on the category’s menu item. You should define this meta description on the category settings (in the Publishing tab of the category settings), thus letting each article to have its own meta description.

Tips 7 – Enable gzip compression

A website’s performance has a great impact on search engine optimization. One of the first things to do, in order to boost your website’s performance is to enable gzip compression on the Global Configuration. This will shorten the loading time of your pages, thus making your website faster.

Tips 8 – Enable cache

oomla comes with a handy cache feature that is disabled by default. As caching affects the overall loading speed of a website, it actually has a major impact on search engine optimization. To enable cache you will have to :

  • turn on Conservative Caching on the System tab of the Global Configuration, under Cache settings
  • enable the System – Cache plugin (where you might leave ‘On browser caching’ disabled)
  • enable the cache of your template (where available)

Tips 9 – Use a sitemap extension

Search engines are relying on sitemaps to analyze the structure of a website. As Joomla does not come with a sitemap generator, the best option is to use a free extension for this task, such as Xmap – a free, reliable and highly recommended Joomla extesion. With Xmap you can have automatically updated sitemaps (even multiple ones, for multilingual websites) and you may also use a 301 redirection for the sitemap.xml file that needs to reside on your website’s root directory.

Tips 10 – Use redirection to eliminate 404 page errors

Joomla features a redirect plugin, which needs to be enabled, that you can use to provide redirections for any URL pointing to a non-existing page of your website. This is particularly important, in cases of a website re-design or a migration from a different CMS (such as WordPress), to make sure that you maintain your old Google ranking.

Tips 11 – Never leave the alt-text of an image file empty

Alternate text of image files has a great impact on your website’s SEO. You should never leave it empty, or – even worse – autocomplete this field with the image’s filename. Use your desired keywords with care, in order to describe each image in a way that even a screen reader can help a user to understand the role of an image within an article.

Responsive Web Design: How Important Is It To Boost Your SEO Ranking?

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Responsive Web Design: How Important Is It To Boost Your SEO Ranking? | Google loves responsive websites. Google runs the search game at this point, and dictates what a lot of websites should or shouldn’t do. If Google put their weight behind responsive website design, then it makes sense to listen. Does your business cater for your mobile audience yet? If not, then the sooner the better. A responsive web design boasts a range of benefits, giving your potential customers the online experience they deserve, whether they’re viewing it on a PC, mobile, or tablet device. Why responsive web design is so great for SEO purposes?

Young couple using tablet computer

What is Responsive Web Design?

A responsive web design means that whatever device is used, the website will respond to their screen size, and be automatically compatible. This allows optimum viewing and usability on all devices, rather than only catering to desktop PCs, and having mobile users struggle to view content. If you’ve ever had to pinch to zoom and scroll around an unoptimized website on a mobile device, you know how annoying it can cause.

How Important Is Responsive Web Design To Boost Your SEO Ranking?

1. Usability

When it comes to SEO, Google runs the show. Google wants to send their own users to the websites they wish to see, which means offering them the most accessible and usable sites for the user is important. And what gives the best form of usability to the biggest percentage of users? A responsive web design. Going responsive means there’s less frustration for users trying to find their way around your website, and it also gives them your content in a format they can actually read.

2. Longer Time on Page

If you are providing a top experience for customers who come across your website, they are going to spend longer on it. If browsers find content on your website that responds and is suitably presented on their device, then they will continue to read and navigate through your website. The longer they spend on the page, the more Google will recognize you are providing a great quality experience for any users, meaning a nice boost in search rankings. If users are spending very little time on each page, whether it’s down to content or navigational issues, then Google will not rank you as highly, then it will reduce your SEO efforts.

3. Link Building

If you have a mobile website, you are going to have fewer links to your mobile site rather than your main desktop one. With a responsive web design, your website is always mobile-friendly, meaning it will still maintain the backlinks of your original site. As people will be linking to your site from both desktops and mobile devices, this combination means you stand a higher chance of gaining a better backlink profile. With a separate mobile website, it would mean starting from scratch in order to build authority. Focusing in on one single site is a much more appealing alternative and that is what responsive web design offers. Responsive websites have the same URL and use the same HTML. Therefore, responsive websites make it a simpler task for Google to crawl and index your content which is always a plus when it comes to SEO.

4. Page Loading Speed

Responsive websites do not require a redirection of queries in order to reach a particular URL. So, responsive web designs will be reduce to only the necessary parts for mobile devices, it leads to faster website load times, which Google will recognize, and use in their algorithm to give you a boost in your search rankings.

Your Web hosting provider can also play a part when it comes to site speed. The information superhighway acts a lot like a real highway. Traffic builds up and slow your Website down. However, if your Web hosting has multiple connections to the Internet backbone, they can re-route you to a less crowded connection. If they have access to a cloud infrastructure, the highway is never too crowded. The cloud servers simply add processing capacity as traffic builds. Cloud infrastructures allow Web hosts to keep your traffic flowing and your site speed up.

5. Sharing and Social Signals

A huge number of social media users are accessing and browsing the networks via the mobile networks. When you share a link to your responsive website, your website will be suitable for whatever device a user is using. If you are sharing content on social media, and don’t have a responsive web design fit for purpose for those on their mobile phones, they could be landing on poorly optimised websites, and fail to digest the content. However, if the site is responsive and fits their screen for easy use and accessibility, they’ll be more likely to stick around.

This is a plus from an SEO standpoint anyhow, but this also means they would be more likely to follow your brand on social media, alongside engage with posts through likes, shares, favourites, retweets, or anything else. The bonus here is that Google now recognizes social engagement as an indicator of good quality content, and so will use social media engagement as part of their search signals to boost rankings. Social media may seem like a waste of time to some, but it is a great way to find new audiences, directly engage with them on a regular basis and also help you stand in search engine results.