Time On Site and SEO?

[bronxpad]

Does time on site impact rankings?

If a person visits your site from the serps or directly visits it by typing in your name in the search field and then leaves within a minute, will that impact your serps?

What is the best way to increase time on site?

[FreightBoy]

From what I understand it most certainly does. The SE use it to correlate the Search Users experience with your site. Bouncing back to the SERPS is an indictor that they may not have found the website trustworthy, or that the pages returned to them via the SERPS wasn't really relevant to their search query.

The best way to increase time on site is to provide quality content that engages the vistor.

[EGOL]

"What is the best way to increase time on site?"

Attempts to improve "time on site" and "pages viewed" are closely associated with the keyword that delivered the visitor.

In general, improving content.  This is not only writing quality but also the visual impact of  landing on a page.  Nice, big, relevant, juicy images (or video) above the fold grab attention and can hold the visitor.

Getting the second (and subsequent) page views depends upon giving the visitor options to additional content pages.  Go to this page on CNN and study it.....

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/01/us/colorado-marijuana-club/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

Look at how they have big video at top.... then several related topic videos immediately below it... the right column generally presents lots of  enticing topics that could be "news pulse", "most popular", CNN on FaceBook, "recommended stories" and more.

If you don't want the visitor to bounce then provide sticky content and sticky options.

[SoftzSolutions]

_However, it makes sense to try to increase average time users spent on website. If a user spends more time on a page that simply means that the visitor is finding the page interesting. Catchy headlines, well written content, use of high quality images, videos etc can go a long way to make visitors spend a few more seconds on the page. On the other hand, if you make the body content appear meaningless by stuffing too many keywords, add cheesy stock images or boring images, add thin content and  make the page heavy with loads of images, visitors will bounce back for certain. Hope that helps. _