For starters, let me clarify what this article is NOT talking about. It’s not about dryer sheets, your kids super ball or how far silly putty might bounce. For those of you perhaps panicking over how much you spent this week it’s also not about bouncing checks.

This article IS about what every web or blogmaster would want to understand, but perhaps would prefer to ignore — the bounce rate of your landing page.

Have you checked your site stats bounce rates? It can certainly portray an ugly picture at times and will fluctuate depending on the referring source, your keywords, content, page speed and yata yata yata — a whole lot of other stuff.

On one of my sites my bounce rate had been what I considered to be fair for quite a few months. All that changed earlier this month and I needed to research why. As mentioned above, there are many factors that can affect your bounce rate so it takes some analysis.

In this particular case I attributed it to the fact that I began to receive quite a bit of traffic from a foreign site. Suddenly the bounce rate went to heck in a hell basket (or how ever you say it - lol), and I have determined it is most likely attributed to the fact that the foreign site is sending traffic over from mainly non-English speaking or reading individuals. Sure, I could change that by adding a Google translator, but I prefer to leave it in just English. Enough of that rabbit trail here, but that should serve as an example with how a referring site can affect your bounce rate either way.

Sometimes I think many bloggers just start to blog and blog and blog without ever taking the time to digest some important factors that affect their blogs traffic. I will be the first to admit that I was guilty of that for a long time, and primarily because it can be overwhelming with how much there is to learn. Blogging is far more than a social event and to not lose your interest you need to see an improvement in your traffic.

So, what to do? Start studying your blogs bounce rate, which begins by understanding how to read your site stats. If you would like to identify what to look for and what to do with the information to become proactive with your bounce rate I found several very good articles to refer you to. I figured these individuals said it far better than I, so I’ll refer you to these articles rather than posting a lengthy article here.

The first article about improving your bounce rate will give you some great food for thought so you can begin to understand more about what bounce rate is and how to improve your bounce rate, and click-through rate.

The next article I would like to refer you to also discusses what is known as KPI, which is aka key performance indicators. Both of the above articles are excellent reading to learn from for those who are serious about improving your bounce rate. For the rest of you who are not serious about it, well — just go follow the bouncing ball.