How To Reduce Your Website Bounce rate

Business owners that have a website for the purpose of converting sales are usually obsessed with the idea of controlling their user actions. This attitude towards conversions and web traffic is absolutely wrong! Respecting your visitors is the first step in converting them into a lead or client.

Most people intrinsically understand that a high bounce rate is probably a bad thing. But what exactly is “Bounce Rate” is?

Let’s get into details:

In most of the cases the lower the bounce rate is the better. You can analyze the bounce rate by using Google analytics.

The key to reducing the bounce rate is to respond in the most appropriate way to the visitor’s needs. By ensuring that more visitors move to the next stage in the sales process, then it is more likely than not the overall conversion rate of the website will improve as well.

Browser Compatibility:

In some circumstances, a high bounce rate has nothing to do with the quality of the content, you have provided and everything to do with the fact that your website isn’t displaying properly in your visitor’s browser windows. Many beginning webmasters fail to realize that what looks good on one browser might display completely differently in another. Hence check pages that demonstrate a high bounce rate using a cross-browser compatibility testing tools.

Reduce Page Loads:

Even if you think it seems fine on your computer, it may not be the case on another one, so make sure to test this out. Because your browser caches’ assets like pictures, scripts, etc. help to make web sites you’ve visited load faster. New visitors to your site do not have this advantage. Page load timers don’t use caching and can give you a true reading of your visitor’s experience.

Provide Better Readability and Better Navigation:

Don’t distract your visitors by showing flashy content and automatic playing audios or video’s. What else your readers observe besides great content? And please never use a tiny font size which is the worst part. Navigate through your pages with a fresh set of eyes and determine how many of these interruptions visitors must content with instead of reading your content

Bounce Rate is low, but still not seeing ant results!

There are lots of potential reasons for this but one thing that’s related to bounce rate that you can check is exit percentage.

Google defines exit percentage rate as “The percentage of site exits that occurred from a page or set of pages.”

Bounce Rate is Just a Beginning!

The above points are key to getting your bounce rate back on track, possibly the most important thing you can do to lower bounce rates is focusing on consistently creating high quality content that appeals your readers.

Think about this, if a user comes into your site and find exactly what they were looking for, an answer to their question then why should they stay a moment longer?

Yahoo Buys Company SkyPhrase-Natural Language Processing Firm

Yahoo has acquired SkyPhrase, a start-up with a focus on natural language processing. According to the blog post revealed by the company Skyphrase will join Yahoo’s New York office and will work with Yahoo to help continue its goal of marketing computers deeply understand people’s natural language and intentions.

The acquisition is just the latest in a spree of purchases by Yahoo under Marissa Mayer’s leadership and it suggests that Yahoo shares the same interest in understanding complex, colloquial input that major tech companies from Facebook to Google have ventured into.

The challenge for Yahoo will be see if they grow SkyPhrase to touch ore of their products. The race for NLP is on, the stakes are high and all of the big players, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Nuance are in a buying frenzy. Yahoo however is the one of that seems to be the best at leveraging the tech in products that reach consumers in the least amount of time.

The acquisition indicates Yahoo sees voice search as a thing of the future-an idea touted most recently by Google. The internet giant has been pushing its Google now voice search service over the last year, and it has even hinted that voice search is where internet browsing is headed. However Yahoo hasn’t specifically detailed what SkyPhrase will be doing under the Yahoo labs research firm.

‘OK Google’ Chrome Extension For Hands Free Voice Search on Desktop

Google has released a chrome extension that brings the voice-activated “Ok Google” command to the browser. When installed, it allows those on the desktop to speak their commands to the browser using the “OK Google” hotword.

The extension also supports reminders, so you can say “Ok Google, set a timer for 30 minutes.” Once installed, you’ll have to give Chrome permission to access your computer’s microphone. Then, a “Say OK Google” notice will appear in the Google.com search bar. When it recognizes your voice, a red microphone will appear and Google will type what you say before giving you an answer. The extension is explicitly labeled as a beta, but it seems to work well.

You need to be on the Google search page for it to work, and it won’t read out all your answers — so its functionality is limited.

For those who are worried about Google listening to all your conversations, the default setting will stop listening for “OK Google” commands after five minutes, which the search giant says saves battery life. A shaded microphone means that it’s listening; the outline of a microphone means that it’s not.

Google Wallet Card Now Available to Order

While the NFC-based Google Wallet payment system may have not taken off, Google is taking another swing at things with a physical Google wallet card, basically fills the same role as the Google wallet app tried to do previously acting as a prepaid debit card that pulls funds out of any connected account.

If you’re in the U.S and have the option to get a Google wallet card, you’ll be prompted in the Google wallet app or on the Google wallet website, where you’ll then have to verify your identity and request the card. Verifying your identity is as simple as giving your name, address, birth date and social security number, but Google already had the necessary information from previous purchases for us to order with two clicks.

The card will arrive in 10-12 days according to Google, and you’ll be ready to activate it and set it up for payments thereafter.

The Wallet card will let you pay for items at any retailer, even those that don’t have the little NFC kiosks Wallet has thus far relied upon. The charge should be relayed to your Wallet account just like you had used an NFC phone. It’s unclear if that’s just the Wallet balance, or if cards are included too. This fits nicely with Google’s strategy of uncoupling the NFC payments in KitKat from the hardware secure element. Google is really making Wallet easier to use on multiple fronts.

Google Helpouts-Get A Help From Experts Via Video

Google has officially announced the launch of Google helpouts after several months, it’s a new offering that people and businesses can use to make money via live social video.

Google said on its blog that its goal with Helpouts is simply to “Help people help each other.” Helpouts can open a new brand new revenue stream for the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company.

Five ways Google can make money of its new Helpout service.

Charge Experts

Google allows now experts to set a price for their help. When Google tested this service, it took a 20% cut of the paid Helpouts as a platform fee. It should also be noted that Google will not charge medical professionals for health care Helpouts.

Charges Brand

You can get help from individuals or from brands you already know and trust. Google could promote these Helpouts in search results, similar to how advertising works in Google Maps, it will be another tool Google can add to its ever-growing portfolio of marketing services.

Bring More small Businesses to Google Service

It will give small businesses a chance to market their expertise for free or cheap and maybe generate a few extra dollars for the company. For Google, it’s another way to get more small businesses involved in its lucrative advertising platform.

Traffic from About.Com and WikiHow

Google search is the number one destination for people to answer a question or get help. With Helpouts Google can keep this traffic for itself, as well as the advertising revenue that the traffic generates.

More users on Google Plus

Google continues to push its Google plus social network by requiring users to sign up in order to use other services. Gmail accounts, YouTube and Hangouts are all tied to Google plus platforms and Helpouts are no different. Google Helpouts appears to be a service that benefits everyone involved, including users, small businesses, big companies and of course Google.

The beauty of Helpouts is its simplicity and it is a wonderful simple idea, using a webcam to show someone how to do something seems blindingly obvious-but this is the first time it has really been implemented in such a way as to be accessible and workable.

Matt Cutts: More Pages on a specific site does not have a direct ranking benefit

Google head of search spam Matt Cutts, released a new video explained the concept of more pages on a specific site doesn’t mean to have a better rankings.

Matt Cutts said “I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you automatically get a high-ranking. That’s not the case.”

He explained that if there are more pages, chances are more to rank for different keywords and more likely to have more overall links and PageRank , which do directly impact your rankings. But the number of pages on specific site, does not have direct impact on ranking factor.

Google Ad Extensions Now Will Have Direct Impact On Rank

Google announced that Adwords extensions and formats are now going to be part of the overall Adwords ad rank formula going forward.

Ad extensions and formats can now affect the positioning of your ads on the Google search results page. Google uses the example: if two otherwise identical ads were to appear with the same bid and quality score, the ad with the ad extensions most likely to perform would appear in the higher ad position.

On Google Adwords , advertising space is extremely limited, making it important to find ways to increase the size and versatility of your ad. Ad extensions are so valuable because they give extra chances to make a pitch to potential customers.

Google said, ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful. Now Google feels it is an important factor to include in their ad rank algorithm. Earlier ad rank was calculated using your max CPC bid and your Quality score. Now with the update, it will also take into account a third component, the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats.

Now you may see lower or higher average CPC’s in your account. You may see lower CPC’s if your extensions and formats are highly relevant. In other cases you may see higher CPC’s because of an improvement in ad position or increased competition from other ads with a high expected impact from formats. For now this update will affect only search ads appearing on Google search.

If you haven’t ventured into ad extensions for Adwords yet, Google also recently added some help pages to assist advertisers in learning about different ad extensions and how to enable them.

Twitter Experiments with Event Parrot

Twitter is renowned for being a go-to resource for real time information about news events. A new account called @event parrot has been created and it describes itself as a “Twitter Experiment”.

Event parrot works much like the @magicrecs account that recommends tweets and Twitter accounts to its followers through the direct messages.

It says “Follow me to receive the direct messages that help you keep up what’s happening in the world.” Users who follow the account have received direct messages about international and national news, repackaging tweets from news outlets.

13,500 users have trusted that so far, and that number is growing fast. It’s impossible to know for sure if Twitter is actually behind the account, but it seems to be a real possibility–though @eventparrot has yet to be verified like @magicrecs.

Assuming @eventparrot is a Twitter experiment, it shows the company is hard at work developing ways to increase and retain its user base as Twitter’s initial public offering looms.

Bing Upgrades to Pintereset Boards in Image Search Results

Microsoft Bing team announced a new feature in image search results UI by integrating Pinterest boards. Microsoft already integrated Pinterest in Bing image search results with the pin to Pinterest feature, allowing you to pin and save results directly from Bing image search.

Now, whenever you do an image search on Bing, you’ll see Pinterest boards appear in the top-right corner. But this search feature is only available to U.S members at the moment, if you’d like to see it in action, you can click the gear icon in the top right corner of Bing and manually change your location to the U.S.

Image collections are great for a search like Halloween decorating ideas, where we bring together cute pictures from around the web with creative collections by people who are passionate about decorating their house in the best way possible.

Earlier this year, Bing added Pinterest pinning functionality to image search, enabling users to pin the images they find on Blog back to their boards back on Pinterest. Pinterest itself recently added more info to article pins, potentially helping drive more web traffic to articles and blog posts.

Google turns on secure search, except for Ad clicks

Google is now beginning to roll its encrypted secure search feature to more people. Earlier, secure search was only available to those who were signed into their Google accounts, now it’s working to make secure search the default for everybody even those who are not signed into a Google account.

In essence various sites are reporting that the “NOT PROVIDED” percentage of organic keyword referrals has jumped from 50-60% up to 95%, 99% or 100% , so sites are not able to pull full international statistics yet, but all signs point of SEOs and webmasters not being able to pull data on Google driven keyword traffic anymore.

Google’s latest move is interesting in the context of its own actions against the NSA as well as recent leaks regarding the agency’s activities. The leaked prism slides from early June revealed that the NSA can collect “notifications of target activity” and “special requests” both of which may involve searches, from the tech companies that are allegedly involved. If Google supplies encrypted searches to everyone, it may be able to slow down the pace at which the NSA can obtain search information from it.

The motivation here is not to drive the ads site-it’s for search users. It’s not still clear why Google seems to have ramped up things.