I recently tried a tactic of writing for just search engine traffic that failed and increased my bounce rate so I’ve decided to correct my mistake and write more for people instead of search engines and decrease my bounce rate. Lately I’ve ended up with a really high bounce rate while writing for search engine traffic that I’m not too happy about, yes the traffic went up while I was writing for search engines but so did my bounce rate and I’m sure I made some really unhappy people in the process. Before this realization I was writing for both search engines and people but in separate ways instead of subtly integrating the two tactics into one article I was writing multiple search engine articles and less of the content articles. Using these difference tactics resulted in a high bounce rate and less click though.

Awhile back I wrote a few post on this blog and a few others that targeted some frequently searched terms not thinking the whole thing though I wrote and posted some content without thinking about what my goals where. Not having a good goal is great if you want your bounce rate to go up. Yes my search engine traffic doubled but so did my bounce rate with it. Having a high bounce rate made me stop and think about what my goals where. Yes I want more traffic but at what costs, writing for search engines alone is a waste of time, all it did was increase my traffic and annoy some interested readers. All the pages I wrote for specific search terms where junk if someone was to read them. I did provide good content on other posts but they were never seen because of the poorly worded content on the search engine targeted posts that forced my readers to move on. If the visitor coming from a specific search term doesn’t like the content there reading, the visitor will leave right away I found this out first hand and have now made a decision to change that by structuring my blog how I would a normal website, write content for people not search terms, adding graphics and content that would keep visitors interested not just search terms that attract search engine traffic.

My first task in decreasing my bounce rate is writing good content for people and then search engines. My second task is to organize my blog like an average website. All good websites have a natural flow to them a flow that if done right will decrease my bounce rate and increase my click though rate. I’m going to accomplish this by adding hierarchical page lists and hierarchical category lists that will provide better organization for my readers. These features are very common on good websites and I’ve added them to almost all websites I’ve done in the past. It just simply slipped my mind when I started blogging.

Correcting my website design and content tactics

The first question that comes to mind is am I writing for people or search engines?

Well the answer to that is simple and complex at the same time. I have to write good content for people otherwise they will leave (increasing my bounce rate) and I have write good search engine friendly content with keywords that search engines need content for. So the answer is to write content for both people and search engines at the same time always keeping my search engine content subtle enough for people reading what I wrote.

Hierarchical Page List for BlogEngine.net

For right now it will just simple indent the child page list until I find an effective solution here is the code to do this and it was actually already done inside the BlogEngine.net admin I just stripped down the code and put it into a widget.

More...

I started looking into WordPress this morning and found some great sites. This post contains some of my findings. 

Rather than writing a post about each website i'm going to fill this post with brief decriptions and links to the original sites.

I just read a very interesting article on WritePress check it out - writepress has kept us very busy 

Here's another great read - wordpress forum hosting talkpress

Glenda the left thumb blogger, Blenda has cerebral palsy and blogs with only her left thumb.