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Hi This is a substantial question, which can have many possible answers.  First, bear in mind there are no "one fits all" solutions - there's no replacement for having a good look at your specific situation.  For e-commerce a >50% bounce rate may be bad, while for a news or blog site (especially when landing on a full article deep within the site) a 50% bounce rate may be pretty good.  So it does vary with the niche. But to actually answer the question, you'll probably want to experiment with on page things, like design, usability, content quality - and especially take a look at the book "Don't Make Me Think" if you haven't. But you should also make sure the right people are finding the right pages in your site.  For example, I had a site that was ranking very well for a certain term, and getting some good traffic.  But it turns out that key-phrase, and the intention behind the search was not aligned with what the site actually had to offer.  So we re-targeted to a more appropriate key-phrase which cut the bounce rate in half! Also, if you have an e-commerce site, be sure the terms you're getting traffic for are transactional in intent (intent to purchase something) vs. informational.  If someone is looking for information but lands on an e-commernce site: higher bounce rate. Lastly, a good benchmark I find is: how do you perform in brand searches?  This is where you want bounce rate to be lowest, time on site to be highest etc.  Someone is specifically looking for your brand, which should get the best metrics.  If these are not where they should be, then you know your on page can be improved. Lots here I know, but hope it helps -Dan

Google has some great help resources when it comes to their products. I would check the GWO help section first. http://www.google.com/support/websiteoptimizer/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=29619&topic=29624

Maybe think in the longer run - it might be worth offering $50 voucher towards car seats for the family model car. $100 voucher to babys'r'us for the younger family demographic. Whatever gets them in to look at the cars!

We have implemented something similar in the past with no negative effects. Same deal with tabbed content. If this type of display is convenient for the user and not only served to search engines then you're within the search engine guidelines. Even if you do get in trouble (very unlikely) there is always a re-inclusion request in which you can explain things to Google. One thing to keep in mind is Google's cloaking filter they've been writing about this recently as they start to compare what is displayed to them to what user would see. I cannot know exactly to what extent the site may vary in appearance with your overlay feature. Visit: Google Webmaster Tools > Labs > Instant Previews See the last paragraph in the attached image. dejan-seo-preview.PNG

This SEOmoz webinar should be exactly what you're looking for

Exactly what EGOL said. Sometimes the hardest work is the most rewarding.

Hhhhmmm with the lack of cheap easy fixes to the vastly in accurate self serve facebook tracking interface, maybe there's an opportunity to build a simple Google Analytics patch through the Facebook api.

Update: The numbers are still solid. People are still filling out the quote form. After 3 months, the actual closing is around 5%-6%. It is profitable. Thanks for the compliments regarding my website.

Just an update on this, The experiement has run its course and the meta refresh didn't seem to give Google any issues with tracking conversions on either version of our land page, so I would say it has been a success.

Don't beat yourself up, I probably wasn't crystal clear.  I've gotten limited success, still working the kinks out...

Thanks. I am trying to get the client to do this...Hopefully that will happen soon. We are also adding a live chat capability.

This is another great suggestion and YES I do this on a weekly basis. IMO, your answer fits right in with the discussion. I usually like to pull my full reports from AWStats from within the server. I then "weed" out certain words that should be within my negative campaigns and find others that may be worth running.

My pleasure! Glad I could help.

Awesome find on the snippet optimizer!

And it would also violate a couple of the terms of use of TripAdvisor, as they specifically prohibit copying and scraping of their content. You're likely to encounter the same problems with duplicate content and copyright in other similar sites, too.

For one, I find it highly unlikely that any of these big players would ever publicly release anything related to that information. So I doubt there is much along the lines of conversion rates for sites you mentioned. However, big sites like those, especially overstock, aren't worth looking at anyway. They sell products that range from less than $10 to over $1,000. Conversion rate is heavily influenced by price. A site that only sells pool tables will be lucky to get conversion rates above 1%. A site that sells T-shirts for $3 is likely to get north of 10% conversion rate. So even if we knew a sitewide average conversion rate, it wouldn't tell us much as some product pages could be much higher and some could be much lower.

I seriously doubt you would be penalized, but Google (the algorithm) is going to know you are just duplicating product titles and not give it any weight and ignore it.  Why muck up the page for your human customers?

Then I suppose what the query was that brought them to that landing page. If someone searches for "replace my windows" or "I need new windows" and ends up on a page offering a free consultation (and assuming the company looks credible, etc) then I can imagine a pretty high conversion rate. 15% seems believable. Maybe even higher if it's just email address in exchange for product info for products related to the initial query. But again, no one is going to share this kind of data because if it's really good it will attract new competitors and no one wants to invite competition...

Keep in mind it goes based on the location of the isp and not users real address.