Erica Verrillo has just published a post on using Alexa, a web site ranking tool from Amazon, to check how your blog is doing and how to use it to gain more traffic.
Erica writes, “If you have just launched a website, don’t even think of trying to improve your Alexa ranking. No matter what you do, your rank is going to be abysmally low (your number will be in the multi-millions), and there is no amount of backlinking, blogging, or giveaways that will get you under 100,000, which is the cut-off point for viewing demographic statistics. Instead of trying to improve your own ranking, you can use Alexa much in the same way…” read more….
Erica is a writer but any business or blogger can use the techniques she mentions to improve their website’s or blog’s ranking in the search engines. Most people who create a website or blog want people to visit their site. The more traffic you get the better and the better you do in the search engines, that is, the more likely your site or blog is to be seen near the top of Google ….
EXCEPT
You do not want your visitors to immediately hit the back button on their browser as soon as they reach your site. WHY? Because the search engines penalize sites with a high bounce rate. If someone clicks to visit your blog or web page and as soon as they reach there, they immediately hit the back button to return to their previous page, this is known as a bounce. A bounce can happen because a site is slow to load (e.g. too many graphics, slow hosting) or because it wan’t what the visitor expected (e.g. poor titles, wrong pictures, etc) or because advertisements are in the wrong place or look like navigation titles (e.g. misleading). I saw a useful blog post one time but the comments were very negative because the title said something different from the content of the post. And no matter how good the post, visitors were annoyed because it was different from what they expected.
If you want to improve traffic to your website or blog, follow the tips in Erica’s post and also ensure you keep your bounce rate low, if you want that traffic to convert into a better search engine position.