Make no mistake about it.  It doesn’t matter if you have a powerful arsenal of promotional techniques, if you fail to impress and engage your visitors in 10 seconds or less, you’re most likely to lose them. If you want to lower your bounce rate, here are a few tips to do just that.

What’s a Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. The more compelling your landing pages are, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.

1. Keep it Simple
Without a doubt the design of your website is the most important factor in trying to reach this goal. Websites that offer no white space for eyes to take a break can become annoying and cause people to leave. Keep the design simple, yet attractive. Use colors to draw attention to different areas, but don’t overwhelm.

2. Highlight Your Goods Above the Fold
Put your important items towards the top of the page. If you have an online store, showcase your products near the top. If you provide a service, display your work at the top. Strut your stuff and make sure people can see it. (Yes, flaunt it!)

3. Make your Navigation user-friendly (menu)
Your website should have a user friendly menu that allows any visitor to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Try to avoid using complicated drop-down menus and don’t bury your pages more than 2 clicks away from the homepage. I suggest using text links that contain keyword and staying away from flash menus.

4. Display Hotspots
A website hotspot is an area where people are automatically drawn to on the homepage. They are designed to get visitors to important pages quickly without even using the navigation bar. Hotspots will help you push a “call to action” or a product that you really want to sell. Make sure they are colorful and stand out from the rest of the website.

5. Improve Page Load Time
Make sure you have optimized the size of your images, kept the text/html code clean, and have designed the homepage to load in the quickest time as possible. If I have to wait all day for a page to load, I have already left the site before it even had a chance to finish.

6. Be Readable
Organize the content on the site to be legible and not just a huge mess. Bold the headers, italicize necessary content and make everything interesting to read or at least make people want to continue reading.

7. Place Search at the Top
In case people can’t find what they are looking for, they can resort to a site search. Some visitors get lost because they can find “exactly” what they want, they now have a quick fix for that.

8. Remove Auto-Plays or Pop-ups
Videos are nice, but they are not nice when your speakers are turned all the way up and the baby is sleeping in the next room. It is annoying, but not as annoying as ads that pop-up when you first come to a website. Get rid of them!

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