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.

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Still not ready for release but here is the experamental code I'm using to enable CommentLuv, I installed it with the new website look.

Here is the script for enabling CommentLuv there are still a few features that need to be added.

Once I'm done I'll upload all the code changes with instructions on how to implement the new code

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Updated

I just found ttis and will not have to create a backup utilitiy read the full BlogEngine.NET Backup Manager to learn more

I did modify the backup manager to create a website related file name instead of the quid file names it was using. I used the website name and the date to make it destinct.

I'm thinking moving the backup function to a web service, making it a shared function and run it on it's own thread, moving the code wouldn't take long and would make this feature less likely to timeout during backups. Zipping the entire website does take time that would be safer run on a separet thread.

I also excluded the log directory that godaddy adds to websites, I use google analytics so don't need it 

I did make a couple changes to the BlogEngine.net Backup Manager Code view the following example code to see my changes

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Once I wrote this out I thought it though and realized that while people will find it easier to read search engines will not like the removal of keywords the link’s text. While I like this idea I don’t think I’ll do it even though it would be hard at all.

What I would like is to have a simple grid control that will allow visitors to enter data. The data could then be rated by other visitors. Because I have multiple websites where this can be used I would like the control to be as general as possible. What I need is simple way of allow people to enter grid data into blogEngine.net that they can then rate. The visitor can sort, add and rate not edit. Authenticated users should be able to add, edit, insert, delete and rate.

If possible I would like to automatically link fields to posts inside BlogEngine.net.

BlogEngine.net Grid Control Features

I would to be able to add, edit, insert, delete, and rearrange columns. Display column data and row count. The post title may be udated to display the count (21 popular plants)

BlogEngine.net Grid Widget Features

The Grid widget would display the most active grid in the system. Maybe also the most active visitor

Example:

A visitor comes to the website looking for plants and finds a web page filled with the most popular plants. The visitors could then rate and promote one plant or enter another plant for other person to rate.

I call this thoughts because both plug-ins are so easy to create that I don't need to create a road map like i thought. KeywordLuv just parses and separates your keywords from your name and CommentLuv has an web service for getting commenter's last post.

I already have some code written for both but will not be releasing them until there are stable enough to run on my blog.

While researching whether or not leave BlogEngine for WordPress I found a nice little poll widget for BlogEngine that I’m going to install right after I write this.

I was researching what plug-ins are available for BlogEngine and to see if maybe I could just fill in the gaps. I'd love to stay with BlogEngine but writing code day and night for features that could be easy obtained by switching to WordPress just doesn't sound appealing. On the other hand if writing plug-ins are easy then I'll just write them and stay with BlogEngine.

The plug-ins I'm thinking about writing are CommentLuv, and KeywordLuv. Let me know if I missed a good one I just started looking into this and don’t know all the WordPress plug-ins yet.

I also found the SEO Pack for BlogEngine.net.

Any feed back on this would be greatly appreciated.