This is a guest post by Steven from CriminalJusticeDegreeSchools.com.
Offline companies spend millions each year perfecting the packaging of their products, because they realize the color schemes and the outward design of the packaging can affect the products bottom-line.
Visual stimuli can attract an individual to a particular product or it can have the exact opposite affect if the stimuli isn’t appealing to the eye.
These facts are critical to bloggers and webmasters because the visual appeal of your blog can affect how a visitor responds to your website. A poorly designed blog can have a repellent affect which will cause visitors to hit the back button. This will inevitably lead to a higher bounce rate and recent signals suggest that Google is taking a sites bounce rate into consideration when ranking a site or webpage.
According to Google: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
What this basically means is that a visitor lands on your page from the search engines or another source and after landing on your page they exit your site without visiting any other pages.
In this post I will discuss certain on-site variables that need to be evaluated when designing and structuring your blog to help reduce your bounce rate and increase the time spent on your blog:
Color Scheme
Colors can impact a person directly and it can even evoke emotion within an individual. Colors have the power to place a person at ease, to make them feel happy and even angry. For this very reason your choice of colors for your blog should be determined with consideration to the image you will like to present.
Bright pink or neon yellow is certainly not suitable for a corporate blog, just as grey, black and any darker color would not be suitable for a blog that wants to induce a relaxed atmosphere. The blend and mixture of colors you choose should reflect the nature of the message you intend communicating to your audience.
Blog Layout
The most pertinent aspect of any blog is its content, and as such you will want your content to receive the most exposure. A two-column theme will ensure your content is not squeezed into a corner and a light background with a dark font will enliven your content.
There are a number of high quality three-column themes but when selecting a three-column theme: the combined length of the 2 smaller columns must not be greater than the larger column width. If it is, your content will be suffocated and it will not stand out.
On-site navigation is another critical element to keep in mind when structuring your layout or choosing a theme. Are the important parts of your site easily accessible? Will your visitor be able to find every page of your site with relative ease?
Internal linking within each article using relevant anchor text will result in a larger number of pageviews and it will help lower your bounce rate. Another great addition to each post is the inclusion of relevant site specific links below each article.
Browser Compatibility
Many themes have not been updated by the developers and as a result they are not compatible with certain browser versions. Your site might be perfectly viewable using your browser of choice, but to another person who utilizes a different browser the site may be completely jumbled.
It is critical for you to examine your site’s compatibility with all the latest browsers to ensure every person who visits your sites is met with a neatly structured layout.
Website Load Time
The load time of a website has now been incorporated as a ranking signal into Google’s algorithm. This means that a site that takes too long to load will effectively experience lower rankings in the SERP’s. To avoid delayed load times on you site you should:
- Select a reliable hosting company
- Utilize plug-ins that are vital and delete unnecessary plugins
- Stick with one reliable statistics counter
- Avoid uploading too many videos and large images on an individual page
Attractive Headlines
If the titles of your post do not offer an instant solution or if it does not represent exactly what the reader is going to receive from the article then you will lose visitors at a rapid rate. Invest a little extra time devising catchy headlines as this is usually the first portion of text a visitor will read.
I personally have assessed one of my blogs and made the necessary changes and this helped reduce my bounce rate by 25%. I was completely amazed by the positive affect a few aesthetic changes could make.
You should also assess these elements and improve your blog on a continuous basis because your visitors are your target market and as a blogger your duty is to satisfy the needs of your market in all areas.
Great article Steven, I think that the first look is always important, the blog interface is as important as the face of the blogger, if it looks beautiful, I’m sure it will stimulate and entice readers to stay longer on your blog. Thanks for awesome post.
Thanks for the comment Trung! I agree with you… lol… yes, it is true that people still judge by outward appearance.
It also helps to aks friends and even family for their opinions of your website/blog design before it goes live. Constructive criticism is always beneficial.
You have discussed some great points Steven. Personally, I like minimalist designs that focus on content. I stay away from using advertisements as I try to get the visitor to see what I have to offer and stay away from distractions. I think it’s important to have a professional website presence in order to succeed as an internet entrepreneur.
I completely agree with you Carl! Looks like you and I have something in common… I’m also a fan of minimalist themes!
Yes I agree with you.According to my experience two things usually affects the bounce rate,one is design of the website and other is the contents. Sometimes your web design attraction divert the visitor towards reading.
A site or blog’s aesthetic is what really attracts me, aside from its content. At first look it must be enticing and navigation-friendly, otherwise I’ll just ditch it. True story.
Speaking of slow load times, Google has been really helpful recently in this area proving alot of great tools for us webmasters to help boost our website speed! If you take a look around the official Google youtube channels it will be a great starting point in that area.
-Jean
Thanks for the comment Jean and the advice. Whether you love Google or hate them, one has to say they are always trying their best to provide as many tools as possible to help webmasters.
You’re welcome Steven, and plus Google is smart enough to know that everybody wins if they take the time to provide webmasters with helpful tools and advice.
-Jean
You’re right, Google really does provide so much free stuff. Google alerts, Google trends, and obviously Analytics and Webmaster tools. It does bother me a little, though, about how much information they have on us all…
I don’t know if it’s just my ISP or is Google Chrome really slow nowadays. But I love the fact that they have the web apps store and it’s free.
This is really very useful post and I fully agree that to reduce the bounce rate, you need to have excellent contents and a optimum design. I also see at my site, the bounce rate is quite high and I am trying to optimize it and I hope that I will be lower it.
It is all about testing Lalit… if you are not testing then you will not realize the full potential of what your blog has to offer. Even going onto a web design, blogging or internet marketing froum and asking people for advice and feedback with regard to your blog will allow you to see exactly what areas need to be enhanced or completely eradicated.
I believe that no matter how good your content is, if you have a poor blog design and loading time takes forever, people would skip out reading your blog. Great post here Steven! 🙂
First look of a website should be good enough to retain them for a long time.I prefer two column in blog,it gives clean impression.Great impressions really reduce the bounce rates
All points are just awesome. I feel content on left side with right sidebar is the most common and the best layout a blog should have. For loading time, we should use cdn and also should switch to thesis.
I agree with you Garish… I’m also a fan of having the content on the left and sidebar on the right. Yeah, thesis rocks 😉
Thanks for your comments Garish!