SmallBusinessNewz

There was a good post from Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik this past week. He discussed the importance of analyzing your site's bounce rates. In other words, figure out what pages your site's viewers are exiting your site from. 

Once you figure what these pages are, work on improving them. Often, the most emphasis is put on the site's so-called "homepage," but Kaushik makes a very good point.

"Remember, you don't decide the homepage of your website," he says. "When people search, the engine finds the most relevant page on your site and that's the homepage. If you have 50,000 pages on your website, you have 50,000 homepages."

So if most of your visits come from search engines, this is something you definitely need to consider. That's why you need to analyze this data using a web analytics service of some kind. You've got to find out the places that are driving the most visitors to your site. This can be done easily in Google Analytics by going to "Traffic Sources" and "Referring Sites."

Some believe bounce rate affects your rankings in search engines. This is a topic that has been discussed and debated, but regardless of search rankings, bounces need to be reduced anyway. Take the time to improve your bounce rate.

There is still debate as to whether or not bounce rate has any effect on your actual search engine rankings, but in the long run, does that really matter? You should be working to reduce your bounces regardless of your search rank. If a viewer bounced, that means they already found your site. That's what you should be paying attention to.