What Comes After SEO?

Search Engine Optimization can take your forum only so far. Once you get your sites well indexed and get traffic coming in, you have to engage readers in your site. A one-second view by visitors of your home page will give you a pageview on your stats, but, it won't sell your products or increase your forum's membership.


So, in addition to paying attention to pagerank and keyword placement on Google, you need to consider bounce rates, and the depth and length of visits.


What are Bounce Rates?
When a visitor clicks a link to your site, takes a look and immediately leaves without looking at any other pages, the user is said to have bounced from your site.


Some bounces are inevitable. People will consult a search engine and receive results that aren't quite what they are looking for. Better search engines will result in fewer bounces, but there are things you can do as well.


Tracking Bounce Rates
One of the easiest ways to track bounce rates is using Google Analytics or Urchin. Google Analytics tracks bounce rates in the Content Optimization section. You can look at the pages that users bounce on most frequently, and you can get an idea of the numbers.


For example, viewing my Google Analytics logs, I can see that my site EAForums lost 23 out of 451 people who came into my site while seeking a quiz on the ABC show Grey's Anatomy. This means that 5.1 percent of the people who saw my quiz weren't interested in taking it.


Furthermore, I can use date ranges to compare my bounce rates from last week to this week. So, I can see that 2.39 percent fewer people bounced off of my forum home page this week than last week.


Likewise, Google Analytics (and most other web stats packages) will show you how long visitors stay at your site and how many pages they view before leaving. There is nothing sadder than seeing that 67 percent of the people who come to your forums stay less than 10 seconds before clicking away to somewhere else.


When to Track Bounce Rates
I tend to look at my site's stats daily and get a feel for how it's doing. But, I take special care to monitor changes in bounce rates after I make changes to my forum's style or add a new feature, I make sure that my changes have not turned off my readers.


A recent change to my portal to make it more bloggish drove bounce rates down by about 11 percent. In my book, that was a successful style change.


Getting Bounce Rates Down
The best way to get your bounce rates down is to improve the quality of your content. But, presentation matters too. Make sure that users who hit your site from some random page can see the depth of information your forums contain. Help them navigate to that content easily, and help them see that your content is worth sticking around for.


Forums can difficult to optimize because they consist primarily of user-contributed content. But, it can be done. The key is to spend your time optimizing the best of your content. If you have threads with solid, informative information, clean them up. Give them meaningful titles. Add more key-word rich posts to the thread to push that thread up to the top of the heap on Google. And, get links to other good related content on the thread page.


If the related threads feature isn't pulling up everything that you would like guests to navigate to, link to the important stuff in the posts. Show your visitors that there is more on your site that they will find helpful, and they will follow your lead to the content that matters to them.
In your non-forum content, make sure you add in links to related forum content. Show your users that your site is an interactive community that is discussing things that they care about. So many sites have a wealth of information that is lost because the site administrator never properly showcases it.


Some Bounces are Good Bounces
Believe it or not, a hobby forum may actually need people to bounce off the site in order to stay afloat. For many of us, ad banners are the primary source of revenue in addition to member subscriptions and donations. Active members seldom click banners unless they think they are helping you. (Which is likely to just get you booted from your banner program.) Active members are generally too engaged in the content and conversation and they tune out the ads.


Your saving grace is guests. VBSEO can drastically increase the number of people who find your site through a search engine. When they hit your site, they may not find exactly what they want, but they may see a relevant adsense banner on the page that looks closer to their needs. They click the link and off they go.


Yes, you got a bounce, which is somewhat depressing. After all, we want everybody to love our site and think we are wonderful. But, you also made a few cents for your forum. It all evens out in the end.




Planning is the Key
Keep a clear goal in your head when you are working on your site. What do you want visitors to do when they come to your forums? Do you want to sell them something? Do you want them to register and post? Do you want them to read a page and then click an ad banner and go away?


Unless you know what you want visitors to do, and you clearly point the way for them, all the SEO in the world won't help you. It's up to you to use careful planning, site design and monitoring tools to help keep the traffic that VBSEO brings you.

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