Make sure that you’re calculating your bounce rate correctly
While reading about bounce rates, I came to the realization that I wasn’t calculating my my website’s bounce rate correctly.  Since this is a photoblog most of my return visitors would only look at a single page and therefore be considering a bounced visit (Remember, Google Analytics defines a bounced visitor as any visitor who views only one page.)  So I needed a way to segment my traffic and only look at new visitors.  Luckily, for me Google Analytics makes that easy.  Here’s my new graph showing the bounce rate for new visitors only.

So it’s a slightly better result than before, but you can clearly see that I still have a bounce rate around 66% which means that I still have some work to do.

Search Engines may not deliver the highest “quality” of traffic to a photoblog
After looking at the “true” bounce rate of my photoblog, I decided that it was important to identify all the sources of traffic that my site is receiving and which sites are sending “high quality” traffic.  I quickly realized that while the majority of the traffic is coming from Google (namely, Google Images) most of it is not what I would consider to be “high quality” traffic.

My definition of “high quality” traffic would be a visit with at least two pageviews.

I need to generate better traffic to my site
My goal has always been to sell limited edition prints via my photoblog, and while there are tons of other things that still need to be done in order to reach that goal, I am a strong believer in the value of high quality traffic and how it’s vitally important to the overall success of my photoblog.  As it stands right now, the organic search traffic that I receive is unfocused at best and needs to be dramatically redefined if I have any chance at meeting my goals.  So I have pulled up the trusty spreadsheet tool and turned to Google’s Keyword tool and will be spending a fair amount of my time researching keywords.  I will let you know how it goes.

Now looking at a single month’s data could potentially be misleading, so I looked at a few months and my site’s bounce rate is getting worse!

What’s your photoblogs bounce rate?

I am going to come up with some strategies to decrease my bounce rates and will post my progress here.