Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with this post. Google Webmaster Tools seem to have a mind of their own. OSE it!

Hi guys,

At the moment we have our main website that is at .com

We have also bought all the other domains that are available, such as:

org.uk, .jp, .it, .mobi, co.nz, co.za, com.au, .cn and .eu

Is there a way we can make these domains work for us a bit more? Currently they all just redirect to .com. Would it be better to put a holding page with a link to us and then a redirect on?

We could do with someone like SEOMoz to do a survey, separated by industry whereby people submit their average bounce rate.

Another good resource is Fireclick Index

http://index.fireclick.com/

Though no bounce rates!

We have a medium sized site, selling books - we have around 15,000 products.

Our bounce rate is 38% and our average time on site is 3:16.

I've heard of bounce rates as low as 9% or as high as 80%, it depends on three main factors as far as I can tell:

1. Industry: what industry is your website in? Like you say in the OP, you see a disparity between eCommerce websites and information sites. If you come across a book site and you are looking to buy books - chances are willing to stay at least long enough to browse a category or do a search. Conversely if you are looking for a specific piece of information, and the specific information isn't available immediately on site - chances are you are going to bounce. I've also heard that Non-profit sites have lower bounce rates compared to say, a flat out retail website. Whilst there isn't an industry average, you certainly can plot bounce rate ranges for industry.

2. Traffic Source / Quality: it's fair to say if you have a bounce rate of over 70% you are probably not getting quality traffic. Or your site isn't relevant to the traffic you are attracting. We've seen a few big spikes in traffic due to email campaigns or blog posts and on those days the bounce rates have always been higher.

3. Web Design: it's clear that website design is going to have an effect on bounce rate - if you've got a well designed and relevant landing page for the keyword you are targeting then clearly your bounce rate will be lower. If you're targeting 'robots' as a keyword and your design is full of pictures of monkeys - expect a higher bounce rate. Slow loading times and often a complete lack of SEO often lead to high bounce rates.

I think it's unfair to compare bounce rate directly between industries - it is subjective, but it gives a great indication of how your landing pages are doing so I often look at bounce rate for landing pages from search only.

Here are some good bounce rate resources:

• Bounce rate and design http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/web-design-bounce-rate/
• Bounce rate demystified http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/07/bounce-rate-demystified.html
• Google Analytics Forum Post on bounce rate: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=3301d79d3932b447&hl=en

Thanks Ryan - just what I needed to know.

Hi,

We have a homepage where we are targeting three main keywords.

'Cheap books', 'buy books' and 'used books'.

We are ranking well for cheap books and making progress on the more competitive buy and used.

My question is how many keywords can you reasonably rank for on one page.

We are targeting other keywords on other pages and having some success - but is three the maximum or is that too many?

Hi there,

We also use Mail Chimp http://www.mailchimp.com - very clever system, easy to use. Has a good level of free account sends and subscribers to get used to how it works. Also has a good sense of humour and integrates with many other platforms easily, such as Facebook, Twitter, Magento, PayPal etc.

I'm not entirely sure what else you are asking.

Apologies for the very basic question - I am trying to determine exactly what link juice is. Every article I seem to find assumes that you already know what link juice is.

From what I can tell it is how your internal links push around from your homepage and how they flow through your site.

I don't understand how to optimize this and how to improve it throughout my site - or what the opportunities are.

I'll attach an image of my site link numbers compared to a few rivals (names removed) to illustrate the difference - not vs the first column but certainly the other two.

Can someone shed some light on Link Juice for me and point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

Oy2c5.png

I agree with EGOL, it is easier to get a link when the site is already linking to content similar to yours in the first instance.

I try my best to build a good working relationship with them in the first instance and not just jump in and ask for a link.

So I open a dialogue on Twitter, Facebook or by email / phone, I send them free books and help them out and then I ask for a link when they are favourable to our company and cause.

Understood - thanks Dan, perfect.

Hi there,

I have a page on our website with an Interview with the author Tess Gerritsen. There has been a reasonable amount of Social Media buzz related to the page and lots of links.

According to SEOMoz we are an A grade for the keyword Tess Gerritsen, we currently rank 29th on Google.co.uk for a 'tess gerritsen' search.

My question is - how long would it take for any new changes to have an effect? I presume the answer would be whenever the page is crawled again.

But is it wise to change one thing, then get crawled and see what the effect is, then the next day change something else and see what the effect is. Or is it wise to change one thing and then leave it a week or so to see the full effect of the change?

Apologies for the vague question, if you need any more clarification just let me know.

Thanks.

Benj

I see. That's tricky then.

I suppose offering currencies for the relevant countries would be a start.

Then get links from websites in that country, and build pages for those countries. Thanks.

Why would my website appear, for example, second for a keyword search on Google.co.uk but on a search through Google.com or Google.com.au (Australia) not appear in the Top 50?

Excuse the simplicity of the question!

Thanks Steve, might as well go for it then. It is a friend of ours. Thanks.

The content will be in the paragraph in a list format. A small amount of text to the top and bottom and around 15 other links to companies the company has done work for. It is relevant to our business, just about, I was just concerned a link could be damaging or have no value whatsoever.

No editorial concern, they are a decent company who we buy recycled computers from, if the link isn't damaging in anyway perhaps it is worth our time.

We have been asked to provide a link on our website to a website which provides us with recycled computers to use (our company brand is based around recycling).

They have agreed that we will get a reciprocal link back to our site.

However the comparisons show that - perhaps this isn't worth it?

Our page authority: 39, theirs 26. Our domain authority: 41, theirs 14. Our linking root domains: 41 theirs 7.

Finally their links are in the # [li] list [/li] # format

I guess my question is threefold:

1 - Will they get significantly more out of this linking opportunity than we will?

2 - Is it worth having the link anyway? (Can it hurt us in any way?).

3 - Does having links in the  # [li] list [/li] # format effect the power of the links contained?

Thanks.

I've added a picture of my crawl errors in SEOMoz

Cq3he

Hi guys,

Started my free trial - very impressed - just thought I'd ask a question or two while I can.

I've set up the website for http://www.worldofbooks.com (large bookseller in the UK), using Magento.

I'm getting a huge amount of not found crawl errors (27,808), I think this is due to URL rewrites, all the errors are in this format (non search friendly): http://www.worldofbooks.com/search_inventory.php?search_text=&category=&tag=Ure&gift_code=&dd_sort_by=price_desc&dd_records_per_page=40&dd_page_number=1

As oppose to this format: http://www.worldofbooks.com/arts-books/history-of-art-design-styles/the-art-book-by-phaidon.html (the re-written URL).

This doesn't seem to really be affecting our rankings, we targeted 'cheap books' and 'bargain books' heavily - we're up to 2nd for Cheap Books and 3rd for Bargain Books.

So my question is - are these large amount of Crawl errors cause for concern or is it something that will work itself out? And secondly - if it is cause for concern will it be affecting our rankings negatively in any way and what could we do to resolve this issue?

Any points in the right direction much appreciated.

If you need any more clarification regarding any points I've raised just let me know.

Benjamin Edwards