Of all the metrics that I struggle and fight with, probably the easiest one I’ve found to correct is a high bounce rate. The reality of website design lies in the fact that many choices are made in page layout, color and image choice based on what the graphic designer or website owner like—not what the customer wants.

Testing on the web has come such a long way in recent years. Once upon a time you had to make a change, and then watch metrics to see if things were better or worse. Now you can make educated choices to determine why people aren’t clicking on a button, or why they’re distracted from beginning your sales funnel with a variety of inexpensive tools and metrics that any webmaster, beginner or expert, can use. Aside from systemic issues such as bad coding that makes pages load extremely slowly, its quite easy to fix your high bounce rate pages.

Fixing high bounce rate pages in two simple steps

The first thing I do when I work on a web page with a high bounce rate is figure out what is distracting the user and making them leave. I always start with the organic phrases used to findthat page. For example, one of my clients offers vacation rental units in a variety of complexes around Mexico coastal resorts. His number two keyword is “Riviera Maya weather.” The landing page for that keyword has a 70%+ bounce rate, and my client wanted to know why. All it took was a quick look at the page to see that it isn’t about weather at all—it’s about renting vacation units in a complex, with weather info pasted in below the fold.

The problem? the searcher is mislead to believe the page is about weather. When they land on the page and don’t see the weather information they’re expecting, they leave right away, their queries unanswered. In this scenario we’ve learned the first rule of fixing high bounce rate pages: Make sure traffic to the page is targeted and you’re giving users what you promise in the search query on the landing page they arrive on.

After determining the traffic to the page is targeted and should be engaging with the content, I look at the layout itself. I use a few tools for this depending upon the timeframe I have for research. If I need immediate results I capture a .jpeg of the above the fold portion of web page, and run it through the Attention Wizard tool from Site Tuners. This tool simulates the eye tracking on a page via an algorithm and generates a heat map of the hot spots and path the typical eye will take around the page. This provides really quite remarkable insight that can help you find fast ideas for improving engagement on a page. Attention Wizard is also great for testing page layouts you want to try, because the page doesn’t have to be live anywhere. If you can create a .jpg of a page you can test its potential results.

If I have more time to test, and want results based on the eyetracking from actual visitors rather than that simulated by an algorithm, I use ClickTale, which I’ve talked about previously.

Either tool will help you determine where they eye and the mouse is going instead of into your sales funnel. Use this data to improve page layout and get users to your message faster. The second rule of fixing high bounce rate pages: Make your conversion path so easy to follow that a monkey could figure it out.

Bounce rates can kill your conversion path, but in reality they’re pretty simple to fix. Can everyhigh bounce rate page be fixed with these steps? Probably not, but I bet you can address 75% of the issues caused by high bounce rate pages by following these steps.

–Carrie Hill

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A September 2008 study from Universal McCann described a “new influencer landscape,” characterized by three trends: the rise in social media, the importance of digital friends, and the proliferation of influencer channels. According to the study, the impact of this phenomenon is threefold: an influence economy, the democratization of influence and the rise of the “super influencer.” While that might be a little philosophical for your average Web worker, it is clear that few have anticipated the meteoric rise of consumer generated content and social media. However, due to some growing pains (no practical business models) and mistakes caused by youthful over-exuberance, social media content is still considered by many to be in its infancy.

The use of social media does raise many questions for the population of Web workers and the Internet businesses that support them. Which sites are most important? What sort of time commitment should be made? How do we monitor our successes and failures? These questions and others are asked each and every day as those within the social media landscape learn from their collective experiences.

This edition of Website Magazine features 50 of the top social media resources available on the Internet. While you may find some of your favorite micro-social networks absent from the list, keep in mind that this is one sample from the overall behavior of one subset of the entire Web population. The list does, however, provide a valuable look as to where the mass of social Web users spend their time, sharing content and visiting sites in droves. Research for this report comes courtesy of Ranking.com, the Web’s largest provider of website popularity metrics and detailed website information on more than one million online destinations. To suggest a Top50 category for consideration in upcoming issues of Website Magazine, please visit us online or email Top50@WebsiteMagazine.com.

–Peter Prestipino

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Forrester Research recently published a fantastic book explaining the social web phenomenon and how companies can harness its energy.

The “Groundswell” is how your customers define you in the social web by talking about you on Facebook, listing you in Wikipedia and posting user-generated videos on YouTube.

This inevitable force will only continue and is creating lasting, permanent change to the way business is run.

One of the great concepts I pulled from this book is the idea of Social Technographics – defining how your customers interact on the web. Listed by level of engagement on the social web from the top down there are: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. Each age group, gender, and nationality has a general profile. This is the first step in identifying where your customers hang out on the web and the best approach to engage them.

Click here for Forrester’s free profiling tool.

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The past week I spent at the Web 2.0 Expo. It was interesting to hear the various perspectives on SEO, SMO, new tools to use for the social web, and the new startups being launched. But by far the most compelling talk I heard was held by O’Reilly at the end of the show.

Through this talk the two founders of O’Reilly’s consulting division spoke about their experiences consulting for enterprise-size, traditional corporations and how these corporations are loosing market share rapidly as a result of the social web. They presented the “seven deadly sins” of social media including not wanting to be engaged in two-way dialogue with their costumers, not wanting to include their “lead costumers” in the beta-testing and product feedback, among others.

By far the most profound point was (and I’m paraphasing): We could give you all a web 2.0 strategy to take back to your company, but the fact is that if a there is not a critical mass of employees within your company that are on-board with this new philosophy – its not going to work.

This is pretty amazing – that essentially the current corporate culture itself, within the company, is the cause of its own downturn. And that this is the only way to remedy the situation.

A perfect example of this is the Comcast video shot by a customer. A Comcast tech arrived to service an account at someone’s residence and fell asleep on the couch after waiting an hour on hold with homebase. Here’s the video:

To combat the bad press – Comcast spent $x Millions in a new “speedy, reliable service” advertising campaign.

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