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“Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life, but even the patience of the brothers was being tested by our slow Internet.”

FATHER DANIEL VAN SANTVOORT, Cistercian monk, on his Welsh island community’s decision to get broadband. Source

I’ve written several times about the need to have an efficient website, which can run fast enough for everyone to use. However, I guess some people didn’t get the message, and have caused the Monks to run out of patience.

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I’ve written about optimizing your site before, but it was in regards on how to optimize your site based upon your usage.

Now there are other reasons to optimize your site, especially if you use Google’s Ad Words to advertise your business.

A little history

Google Ad Words was one of the first ways which small business owners could advertise on the web. It allowed you to create small ads based upon keywords which people typed into Google. Users could bid on key words to modify the placement of their ad.

If someone typed in a key word you requested, and you bid high enough, your ad was seen.

Enter the Quality Score

Unfortunately, many times the ads shown had only a little to do with the key word entered by the user. So Google added a quality score. The quality score, in combination with your bid, would drive the ads position.

The quality score looks at a variety of factors, such as:

• landing page (the page which the ad leads to) optimized (or about) the key words that were bid on,
• how often is the ad clicked (called the Click Through Rate),
• does the page convert visitors into buyers (this is a minor factor only checked if few clicks are produced)
• and other things.

Just like Google doesn’t tell us everything that goes into their Search Engine rankings, they don’t tell us everything that goes into setting their quality score, but the do sometimes give us some hints.

Page Optimization

The latest hint they gave us deals with page optimization. (learn more here at SEO Round Table) Interestingly, a poor load time for your page will negatively effect your quality score, but a good load time will not improve it.

Google recommends:

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
• Contact your webmaster or web hosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your web site’s load time.

So if noticed a recent drop in your visitors due to lower ad word placement, you might want to consider optimizing your site.

I personally see before too long, page load times affecting the regular ranking of pages as well.

I am proud to announce the updates for Dayspring Community Church’s website.  As they just merged with Plymouth Church, it is fitting that they should have updated the UI for their site.

Updates include:

• Restructuring the menu to be easier to read
• Improving the Search Engine Friendliness of the site
• Modification of the page layout
• Optimizing the web pages to load faster
• Adding a Web 2.0 style picture gallery

In our last post, Why People Leave Your Web Site, we referenced the Bounce Rate, and why its not something you want your site to have much of.

In order to understand how to reduce your bounce rate you need to know why it is happening. Here are some unacceptable reasons why you might have a bounce, and what you can do to fix it:

• Your site takes too long to load. This could mean you need more bandwidth/better server or, more likely, you need to optimize your site.
• Your presentation is too simple/complicated. We could call this the ugly factor. While it might be unfair, people do judge a book by its cover. How your site looks will influence people’s decision to stay or leave.
• You provide too much information. Long paragraphs, longer pages, no headlines, etc. make your text difficult to read. People want fast information, and if they can’t find it, they’ll go somewhere where they can.

However, you might have some reasonable “bounces”. Here are some acceptable reasons:

• The user found the information right away - they were looking for your address and found it, wanted to know the price of X and now they do, etc. - no need to keep looking.
• The user clicked on the wrong link/typed in the wrong address, noticed, and left right away. I’m looking for ABC, you’re CBA, and I figured it out. - This is a bummer, but it happens. The site address could have changed, a spelling error occurs, etc., but then you get the incorrect user, who may not even be looking for what you have to offer.

Because of things like this, you will usually have some bounce.

So what is an acceptable bounce rate?

This will often vary depending upon what type of site you offer. Just as sometimes you will walk into a store and leave, your users will not always purchase or even stay very long. This may be your site, it may be them.

The more niche your site, the less accidental users you will get. An Intranet site will be about as pure as you can get. One Intranet site I watch actually has a bounce rate of less than 7.75%. People generally only go there if they need to.

I oversee a niche site, that while they only get about 140 visits a day, their bounce rate hovers around 15-18%. This means very few people leave when they see the site, and they can convert more users. They also get a lot of links for authority sites, and word-of-mouth advertising. Their off-line marketing of their website helps them immensely.

For a more general website, what you will hear varies. Anywhere from 40-55% is considered common and acceptable. I like to find what I have, and work on reducing it from there.