Whether promoting content on your website, blog, email marketing campaigns, or social media channels, one of your goals is for readers to engage with your content. One primary form of engagement is clicking on links; links to fill out a form, links to download a free eBook, links to product specifications, etc.

These links are your calls-to-action, which aren’t just limited to the “big red button.” If you think about it, every link you create is a call-to-action, since there has to be some reason you’ve linked to some internal or external content. And the more internal links users click on, the greater chance they will become a customer or lead, and lower your bounce rate.

So here are eight easy ways to optimize your links within content to get more clicks:

1. Underline all links

This might seem obvious, as underlined text is commonly recognized as linked text. However, many designers prefer a more sophisticated non-underlined look, so it’s important to make sure your links are obviously links by including the underline.

2. Make links a different color

It’s important to make your links stand out so users know to click on the link, so this is the same principle as underlining your links. You don’t need to use neon colors here; just make links a different color than your regular font color using one of the colors in your design scheme.

3. Bold important links

Bolding every link just looks obnoxious, but if you bold important links within your content, it will attract your readers’ eyes and make it clear that whatever content is behind that link is important.

4. Use relevant and descriptive anchor text

Adding a linked “click here” to your content is simply a wasted SEO opportunity. Instead, delete the “click here” and add the description you’d written before or after it into the link itself. That way, you’ll get the added SEO juice if linking internally, and if not you’ll give your readers a better idea about what they’ll be clicking on.

5. Open external links in a new window

If you link to external sites without opening the link in a new window, you’ve lost the user unless they hit the back button. But it’s likely that they will close the tab when browsing a new page, and then you’ve lost them for good. If you add  the target=”_blank” attribute to a link, the external page will open in a new window, and when the user closes the new tab, they’ll be right back on your website. I’m very surprised at how many blogs and websites I see that do not have links set to open in new windows; I often have to go back, right click the link, and click “open link in new tab.”

6. Place important links high on the page

Ideally, your primary calls-to-action will be above the fold. But when writing a long blog post on a blog that has a big header, ads, or additional content above the post, this may not be possible for every link. The farther people have to scroll down your page to see a link, the less likely they will be to see it and click on it. So make sure your links are close to the surface.

7. Make sure image links have associated text links

If your links within content are syndicated via RSS, you can’t guarantee that people receiving your RSS feed via email will see the images, since many email services block images by default. So if you include image links, make sure (1) that your images have descriptive ALT tags and that (2) you include text links either as a caption or within the preceding or following paragraph.

8. Look at your data!!!

Go look at your data right now. Which links generate the most clicks? Take a look at those links and take note of what makes these links different than the rest on your site. Is the call-to-action language more persuasive? Is it bolded? Is it above the fold? And then once you implement the tips above, what sort of difference do you see in your data?Related Posts:

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Thesis is an amazing Wordpress theme. I recently made the switch to the Thesis theme from the free Flexibility 2 theme, and I can already tell that it was a worthwhile investment. When I was looking for a new Wordpress theme, my main criteria were customizability, SEO friendliness, fast load times, and excellent user support. By choosing Thesis, I got all this and SO much more.

Download the Latest Version of Thesis >>

1. Fully Customizable

When it comes to customizations, the sky is the limit. Even if you’re a novice at programming and CSS, Thesis makes it pretty foolproof. Instead of having to modify core theme files and risk breaking your blog, like you do with most free Wordpress themes, you won’t have this problem with Thesis. The only two files you’ll have to customize are custom.css and custom_functions.php. This also means that when making future Thesis upgrades, your customizations will carry through to the new version, so you won’t have to redo all of your hard work.

As long as you know enough CSS and PHP to be able to take pre-existing code and modify it for your own needs, you can make your theme look EXACTLY how you want it. There’s also a nifty little plugin called Thesis OpenHook that lets you place your custom code anywhere on your blog, including before content, before or after sidebars, in the header, in the footer, etc.

2. Outstanding Support

This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest advantages of the Thesis Wordpress theme. The support is simply amazing. After buying the theme, future upgrades are free. And if you have any questions about the theme, the Thesis community forum is excellent about answering your questions quickly. The team answers anything from setup and implementation to plugin integration and advanced customizations, and usually within a couple hours (in my experience, and a  day at most).

The support team really goes out of its way to help people customize their blogs with Thesis, and you simply don’t get this with free themes.

3. SEO Friendly

The Thesis theme was developed with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. I’d have to say that most themes out there, especially the free ones, have so much code bloat. They prioritize fancy designs over SEO, and the code just weighs those themes down. Remember: it’s not the design that gets you search engine traffic; it’s the content and SEO. If you have tons of messy code above your content, the engine crawlers are going to see the mess first, rather than your high-value content.

Thesis has very clean code, and the only two files you need to customize are called from externally, so even the fanciest designs maintain a clean code structure. It also eliminates the need for the All in One SEO Pack plugin, as you can specify each post’s meta tags within the theme’s functionality.

4. Easy to Use

If you’re a true novice when it comes to coding, Thesis is good to go out of the box. The initial design is very professional looking, and the Design Options page allows you to make font, color, site layout, and image customizations. One feature I personally love is the ability to change the column layout without having to go into the code and risk breaking the universe.

All you have to do is choose between a two and three-column layout, and simply click the radio button next to the column order you’d prefer. And it was so easy for me to make other customizations, such as adding thumbnails next to my popular posts in the right column. Since making the switch to Thesis, my blog’s bounce rate has decreased nearly 20%, and I simply wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to make these customizations with a free theme.

5. Highly Successful Bloggers use Thesis

Having endorsement from very successful bloggers who use the Thesis Wordpress theme on their own blogs made a big impression on me. Here are just some of the top blogs that use Thesis:

• Problogger
• Chris Brogan
• Twitip
• Copyblogger
• SimpleMom

6. Eliminates the Need for Many Plugins

Because of the extensive customization options and outstanding support community, you can easily implement changes using Thesis Hooks that eliminate the need for certain plugins. For example, I was able to easily add page numbers to the bottom of my homepage and get rid of Pagenavi simply by searching the support forum for how to do this, and copy/pasting a couple bits of code into custom.css and custom_functions.php.

Eliminating plugins will reduce the amount of php calls on your blog pages, and increase your blog’s page load time.

7. Fast Load Time

Again, I really need to emphasize the importance of having a fast page-load time. With my last theme, the code was so bloated that my blog loaded so slowly, even after I eliminated all plugins to test out how fast it would load. Because the Thesis framework is so clean and SEO friendly, you also get the benefit of extremely quick load time (barring your use of certain plugins). Remember, the faster your page load times, the less frustrated your readers will be, and the lower your bounce rate.

8. The “Big Ass Save Button”

When I first installed Thesis and went to one of the customization pages, I literally laughed out loud when I saw the save button:

I mean, really, that’s just awesome.

In Conclusion…

This doesn’t even cover all of the unique features Thesis has to offer. But one hesitation that many people have about Thesis, including myself, is the price tag. The personal option runs at $87, and the developer’s option is $164. I chose the developer’s option so that I can implement Thesis on all of my blogs, and so that I can offer Thesis to clients at a much smaller licensing fee. (So if you want to hire me to set up or improve your blog,  consider yourself having saved $87.) I personally decided that the theme would ultimately pay for itself, as it’s now so much easier to monetize this blog, and you can probably apply the same logic to your own blog. It’s simply worth it.

Disclaimer: Yes, all the links to Thesis in this post are affiliate links. If you do decide on purchasing Thesis, I would appreciate it if you used the links.

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Now that you know why you should lower your blog’s bounce rate, let’s cover some easy ways you can reduce the bounce rate of your blog.

First, it’s important to understand what a bounce rate is, and to analyze your current bounce rate using Google Analytics. So if you don’t already have Google Analytics installed on your blog, install it and wait at least a week to accumulate some stats and determine your blog’s bounce rate. And keep in mind that blogs tend to have a higher bounce rate than other types of websites.

Definition of Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of readers that “bounce” away from your blog after just one page view. According to Google expert Avinash Kaushik, your bouncing site traffic won’t even give you five seconds of consideration; that’s not much chance to impress! You can find out your blog’s Bounce Rate right on the Dashboard of Google Analytics. The formula Google Analytics uses to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce Rate = Total Visits With Only One Page View / Total Visits

A reader can bounce, or exit, your blog by:

• Clicking the back button to leave your blog
• Closing the tab or window of your blog
• Going to a new URL from the browser’s URL bar
• Clicking a link to another site
• Session timeout (when a user only has one page view, but leaves the browser open for 30 minutes on that page)

How To Improve Your Blog’s Bounce Rate

1. Highlight popular posts above the fold

Many blogs make it difficult to find the highest quality posts, so the users quickly get bored and leave. With the oversaturation of content on the Internet, it’s important to prominently display your most popular posts from your blog above the fold where they can be easily seen, such as on the top of your sidebar. You can use Google Analytics to learn what your most popular posts are. This will spark the reader’s interest to click and read more on something you already know your readers find interesting.

2. Use post excerpts on the homepage

If each of your blog posts are too long, you may only be able to fit 2-3 blog posts on your homepage. If your first-time visitors don’t find one of those few posts interesting, it’ll lead to a higher bounce rate. This is where blog excerpts come in handy. Display only a paragraph or two of each post on the homepage. This way, you can fit anywhere from 10-15 blog posts on your homepage, which gives readers a much greater likelihood of being interested in one of those posts.

3. Share related posts on each post page

Traffic from search engines or social media sites will usually land on a single post page. This kind of traffic tends to have a higher bounce rate. Listing 4-5 related posts on the bottom of each post could help keep these users interested. You can manually add these links at the bottom of each posts, or if you have a Wordpress blog, the Wordpress plugin Similar Posts will automatically generate five related posts to list at the bottom of each post.

4. Interlink within the content of each post

If you are writing a post and find yourself referring to something you’ve previously written about, link to that older post using relevant anchor text. If you look at the first paragraph of this blog post, you’ll see that I’ve linked to my previous blog post 5 Reasons to Lower Your Blog’s Bounce Rate. There, I’ve just done it again. Have these links open in a new window so that your readers can get that clarification from your previous post, and then return back to the first post to keep reading. Interlinking will also improve your blog’s SEO.

5. Provide obvious links to homepage

If your first-time readers are landing on a single-post page and are interested in your blog, they will want to see your blog’s homepage. So make your header image link to your homepage. It really surprises me how often I see the header image NOT link to the homepage; this should be an automatic setting on every blogging platform. If the link to your homepage is hard to find, your readers might get frustrated and leave your blog entirely. Provide another link to your homepage in the navigation.

6. Have clean navigation

Make your navigation clean and easy to spot; try not to clutter the navigation area with Google AdSense or affiliate ads. And keep it simple; your top navigation should link to your homepage, about page, contact page, archive, and perhaps a few other top-category pages.

7. List the your blog categories

Include a list of your blog categories in your sidebar. This way, if a user is interested in a particular topic, he can easily navigate to a page that will list all of your posts on that topic. Utilize the setting that displays the number of posts you have in each topic to peak interest.

8. Post high-quality content

Content is always king. You will read this everywhere (at least, from authors who know what they’re talking about). Good content = high traffic. Good content = high viral sharing. Good content = lower bounce rate. If you’re looking for easy ways to get tons of traffic, you might be sick of hearing this. But it’s so true. Having good content isn’t always easy, but if you focus on turning out high-quality posts a few times a week rather than short, crappy posts every day, you will reap the rewards.

9. Improve loading speed

Users might get frustrated if your blog takes forever to load. If you use a blogging platform with plugins, such as Wordpress, try keeping the amount of plugins installed to below 15. And if there’s one plugin that slows down your blog significantly, consider finding an alternative. Also make sure all of your images are compressed so they load quickly.

10. Remove anything that autoplays

Videos, music, or any sort of media should never autoplay. There’s no better way to get a visitor to click the back button than by having autoplay media on your blog. The user should opt into any media on your site via a play button..

11. Provide ways for users to interact

Prompt your readers to comment on your blog posts by asking questions at the bottom of each post. Have a blog commenting system that is visually appealing and easy to use. Also, include polls, surveys, or other interactive plugins to keep your visitors on your site.

12. Be smart about monetizing

Most bloggers try some methods for monetizing their blogs. This is great, but don’t overfill your blog with ads. Not only does your bounce rate increase with each ad click on the first page view, but too many ads will make for a frustrating user experience. Anything that might frustrate your readers will give them a reason to click that back button.

13. Rethink your sidebar

Try removing some of the external links from your sidebar. If your blogroll doesn’t include extremely relevant links to your niche, remove it. If you see that not many people are clicking through to your MySpace page through your sidebar, delete the link.

14. Research using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely useful and completely free tool; take advantage of it! You can find out all sorts of cool nerdy things like which traffic sources yield the highest bounce rates. For example, traffic from StumbleUpon might have a bounce rate of 88%, but traffic from your Facebook fan page might have a bounce rate of 60%. This way, you can learn which traffic sources to focus more of your marketing efforts on. You can also see the bounce rate of each and every page on your site and optimize accordingly. How awesome is that??? (Yes, I’m a dork.)

15. Optimize older blog posts

Don’t just forget about your older blog posts as time passes. If you elaborate on a certain point you made on an older blog post, go back to that older post and link relevant text to your new post. If that text doesn’t exist, make a slight modification to add it in. Make these tweaks and then note the changes in Google Analytics to see how effective your interlinking really is.

16. Test, test test!

To build on #19, after you make optimizations to reduce your bounce rate, wait a week or two and then look at your Google Analytics stats to see if your optimizations were effective. Don’t be afraid to tweak and try new tactics; you can always change things back.

What other tips do you have to reduce bounce rate? Have you implemented any of these tips? If so, how have they worked for your blog?Related Posts:

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Did you know that lowering your blog’s bounce rate can get you more subscribers? Or that your Google page rank might be partially determined by your bounce rate?

Unlike regular or ecommerce websites, blogs tend to have higher bounce rates because of several reasons, including the nature of blogs (readers only find value from a single post), affiliate marketing tactics (encouraging users to click ads to external sites), and methods bloggers often use to promote their blogs (social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon). As such, bloggers tend to overlook the value of implementing tactics to reduce their blog’s bounce rate at all.

First, let’s cover the basics:

What is a Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is a percentage of visitors to your blog that “bounce” away to a different site before visiting a second page on your blog. The formula looks like this:

Bounce Rate = Total Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Visits

A visitor can bounce from your blog the following ways:

• Clicking a link to an external website
• Closing the window/tab for your blog
• Entering a new URL
• Clicking the back button to leave your blog
• Session timeout (30 minutes of staying on the first page and leaving the browser open on that page)

Why You Should Lower Your Bounce Rate

1. Visitors Will Consume More Content

You should focus on tactics to lower your blog’s bounce rate to keep visitors on your site and consuming more content. The more pages they look at, the more interested they will be to ultimately subscribe to your blog and come back for repeat visits. The lower your bounce rate, the more valuable and loyal readers your blog will inherently have.

2. Increase Viral Growth

The more content your visitors consume, the more likely they will be to share your content with their connections. This personal endorsement for your content can be more effective at bringing in traffic than some of the tactics to increase page rank, such as link sharing or buying.

3. Increase Engagement and Blog Comments

Once visitors read more content on your site and read other users’ comments, they will become more likely to comment themselves. And again, subscribers and repeat visitors will be more likely to comment on your posts.

4. Increase Conversions

The longer a visitors remains on your site, the more opportunities the visitor will have to click on those Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. Or perhaps you’ve written an eBook; the more interested a visitor is in your content, the more likely he will be to purchase that eBook to find out more. Additionally, getting a user to become a fan of your Facebook page through your Facebook Fan Box or follow you on Twitter is still a valuable conversion because of the free advertising opportunities later.

5. Improve Search Engine Rankings

It’s been speculated that your bounce rate can affect your search engine rankings. According to this article on Search Engine Land – Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor – a website’s ranking can be impacted by significant changes in bounce rate. Search engines like Google want high-quality sites to appear higher in their search results, so sites with a higher bounce rate might indicate low-quality content or a poor site experience. Again, this is a big MAYBE, but it’s still worth keeping in mind.

In a couple days, I’ll cover some ways you can improve bounce rate on your blog. Have you implemented any tactics on your blog to decrease your bounce rate?Related Posts:

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Obtaining a high page rank isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes time, effort, and patience. You may have read advice that tells you to comment on other relevant blogs, build relationships with dofollow bloggers, participate in forums, and guest blog. And while that’s all good advice (great advice, actually), some of us don’t have as much time as others. And these things are very time consuming.

So here are some simple SEO tips you can use without having to leave your own blog. And remember: even though it’s good to put yourself out there and be an active participant in the blogosphere at large, your blog’s content (quality, quantity, and relevancy) truly is the main factor when it comes to getting traffic to your blog.

1. Content is King

I can’t emphasize this enough. The quality and richness of your content make more of an impact on page rank than any of the tips to follow (though they do help move things along). Strive to have unique and frequently updated content on your blog, and it will drive up your ranking.

2. Link Out

Link out to at least one external site in every blog post. Establishing site relevance is a huge factor in your page rank, so link to pages and sites that are relevant to yours.

3. Links Should Have Meaning

Update your anchor text (the text acting as a link) to have better keyword value. Both internal and external links should have meaning, and stay away from using “here,” “click here,” “this,” etc. as links.

• Incorrect:  If you’re looking for Twitter badges for your site, click here.
• Correct: Here are some Twitter badges for your site.

4. Optimize Your Permalinks

Include the post category and post name in your URLs. Use keywords in your URLs, keep them short and sweet, eliminating words like “and” or “the.”

• Incorrect: http://UStandOut.com/?p=123
• Correct: http://ustandout.com/twitter/beginners-guide-twitter

5. Create a Sitemap

Having a sitemap will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your blog. Read more about creating Google Sitemaps, and if you have a Wordpress blog, install the plugin Google XML Sitemap Generator.

6. Use Header Tags

Use header tags <h></h> instead of bolding your headlines/subheadlines. Since header tags aren’t the prettiest in terms of formatting, use CSS to override the default look. For example: H1 { color: red; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 18px }.

7. Use Title Tags

Title tags (<title></title>) determine what that page will be called in the search results. Be sure to use rich keywords in your title tags. For those of us who use Wordpress or another blogging tool, this will be automatic, so be sure you’re using those keywords in your blog titles.

8. Use Description Tags

The description tag (<meta name=”description” content=”Description tag here.”>) determines the text that goes below your page’s title in the search results. These should be no longer than 160 characters in order to show up completely and correctly on Google.

9. Use Alt Tags on Images

Every image on your site should have an alt tag, especially if the image is relevant to the content of the page. And don’t simply give it the tag “screenshot” or “image.” Make the tag keyword rich. For example: “The Tweetdeck Application for Twitter.”

10. Don’t Try to Fool Google

You’d think this was a no-brainer, but I see it all the time. Do not try to fool Google. Do not stuff keywords in invisible text, do not purchase links, do not partake in “link swapping,” and do not take any of advice from those blogs encouraging you to cheat the system. Your site will be flagged, and your page rank will be lowered. Bloggers that actually do have good content often hurt their page ranking because they’ve attempted these tricks. Just don’t do it.

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If you’re planning to use LinkedIn to find job opportunities, optimizing your profile will help you stand out. But did you know that you can also use LinkedIn to improve the SEO of your website or blog?

Here’s how it works: if high ranking websites link to your website, it will improve your website’s page rank, so you’ll appear higher in organic Google searches. LinkedIn profiles have a fairly high Google Page Rank, so if have good profile SEO and link your website to it, your website’s SEO will also improve. I’m not claiming that your page rank will shoot through the roof (you need many, many backlinks for that to happen), but it will help a bit, and if more people click on your LinkedIn profile, they may also click on your website.

These are four simple ways to optimize your profile and your website at once.

1. Create your own permalink

View your profile, and change the custom URL. Change it to your full name, your company name, or targeted keywords if they are still available. You might only want to use the company name if you own the company or know you’re there for the long-haul.

You can gear your LinkedIn permalink toward your website or blog. For example, if dianafreedman had already been taken, I might have chosen dianasocialmedia, dianafreedmanweb20, or dianaustandout. Something that incorporates name + keywords or name + company.

2. Link to your websites using anchor text

Linking to your websites will not only give Linkedin users more insight about you, but you’ll also be improving your websites’ SEO. Anchor text links that contains relevant keywords is something Google looks for when ranking your website. So by using your name, site title, and/or relevant keywords will actually improve your site’s SEO since LinkedIn is already ranked so high.

Instead of listing websites as “My Company” or “My Blog,” choose “Other” so you can choose the name of the link. Make sure that your website links appear on your public profile.

Before:

After:

3. Modify your headline

Your headline is the tagline that appears right under your name in LinkedIn searches and on your profile. Instead of just writing your position, include more information about what you do, using keyword-rich descriptions. If you work for a company, put that name in the headline.

My headline before: Product Associate

My headline now: Product Associate, Social Media at TripAdvisor & Web 2.0 Blogger

4. Use keywords throughout your profile

There are several other places you can use keywords: summary, job descriptions, and interests. Make your descriptions are concise and keyword-rich (without overdoing it). Also put keywords in your job title; instead of just including the title, include the department or team. For example, my job title is Product Associate, and I’m on the social media team, so my job title on Linkedin is “Product Associate, Social Media.” At my last internship, I was a Design Assistant on the motion graphics team. Before, I just wrote “Design Assistant,” but after revamping my profile for SEO, it now says “Design Assistant, Motion Graphics.”

Guy Kawasaki has a great article: Ten Ways To Use LinkedIn, in which he also discusses improving LinkedIn SEO.

Making your profile search engine friendly is easier than you thought, right? You can view my LinkedIn profile here to see how I’ve used keywords throughout my profile

More on LinkedIn:

• Before Networking on LinkedIn, Makeover Your Profile
• Building Your LinkedIn Network
• How to Network Beyond the 2nd Degree on LinkedIn

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