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Bounce rates have been a concern of many bloggers especially those who use Entrecard. It’s THE biggest complaint surrounding this popular social networking enterprise and it’s one that will continue to haunt it’s users as long as “dropping cards” is the primary focus of the network.

Most other social networks simply use post submissions as driving elements or, like Blog Catalog are a simple catalog of blog sites that you can peruse and visit those that appeal to you. Other social networks rely on site visitors to “vote up or down” a particular post that was submitted. Entrecard is different from all of those with it’s system of visiting sites and “dropping your cards”. You get credits for dropping, credits for being dropped on and credits for advertising other blogs on your website 24 hours at a time.

There are a lot of criticisms of Entrecard’s methodology. Bits and pieces of it are torn apart by it’s users; both proponents and detractors at some point try to rethink the way it works because like any thing else in this world, it doesn’t please (nor can it ever) everyone.

Which doesn’t make it perfect either.

But the goal of this post is not to hash out the pluses or minuses of Entrecard, but rather to address the bounce rate it generates.

I’ve been a member since November of last year and, like many others have run the gamut of beginner, top dropper to now balancing Entrecard with all the other things in life that I must attend to.

Dropping cards takes a LOT of time especially if you’re trying to do the maximum number of drops over more than one blog.

And, to be honest, this is where your bounces come from.

By dropping those 300x cards, you encourage and invite those bounces.

I’ve changed my dropping tactics by a couple of different means. One to reduce bounce on other blogs and the other to help curtail my own bounce rate.

I am only dropping on about 50 sites per day from this blog and those are all in my favorites and are blogs that I enjoy reading and often comment on or stumble posts on. I also, instead of closing each of the pages as I drop, once I’ve finished dropping under one blog account, change to the next in my toolbar, then go back through all the tabs clicking on other articles on the sites which reloads the entrecard widget enabling me to drop for that account. This action should significantly reduce my bounce rates on those blogs I do still drop on. This is difficult to do on some of the blogspot blogs because not all of them show the side bars on the individual posts, but still clicking through to a post and then back should not result in a “bounce”.

My own results from slowing down my dropping and moving the widget show some big changes in my statistics. Maybe this is an anomaly, but going from a 90% bounce rate with an average visit of 11 seconds to a 30% bounce rate with an average visit of 1.36 minutes is a pretty significant change to my way of thinking and that’s how it’s been for the past 2 weeks!  And I WAS going to include a screen shot of my Woopra statistics to show you, but it doesn’t seem to be working right now. If it comes back up, I’ll update the post with a screen shot and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I know many of you have dropped Entrecard recently. What do your stats show you regarding bounce rate and average times spent on site? Are you seeing improvements? Do you feel like  your visitor count is now reflecting people who are truly interested in what you have to say and show?

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In this article, Scott talks about letting the concern over achieving SEO with Google as your main focus a rethink. He targets other search engines such as MSN and goes on to outline just how he does that.

His first tip was to register a new domain that is as close as possible to your keyword, then build a webpage using the keyword as it’s title and basically follow all the instructions I gave you in my first post on SEO, What the Heck IS SEO and Why Do I Want It?

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but creating all these webpages focussed on a single keyword isn’t my goal. If you’re like me (and most of my readers are), you’re looking for ways to optimize your already well-established website.

But Scott’s advice on targetting other search engines besides Google definitely piqued my interest and prompted some thinking of my own on how to target them without using the first 4 steps of Scott’s method. I wanted a method tailored for an existing site.

Did you catch that?

Skip the first four of his steps and concentrate on 5, 5a, 5b and 5c.

He advocates getting links from any source whether it has Google PR or not, submitting to directories such as DMOZ.org and Yahoo.com which are the two largest, posting in forums that are relevant to your subject and comment on blogs (same criteria), and his last point was to submit articles to article submission sites such as SubmitYourArticle.us . He also mentions using some software tools such as SEOLite, but I’m not sold on those myself.

I also read an article this morning at Orange Inks about a new blog reaction tool called Psolenoid which I’m giving a whirl with here at eyespi20.com. Basically Psolenoid is a combination social networking, commenting, and article submission tool that I believe may just make such labor-intensive social sites such as Entrecard a thing of the past. I am truly excited about the potential I see in this tool and am heartened by the immediate and direct answer to my concerns about spammy stuff ending up on my site. Unlike Entrecard which has never made much of an effort to keep out spammy sites, Psolenoid promises from the get-go to strictly police the sites submitted to it.  There’s no time-wasting card dropping to do and I still get to visit the sites that are of interest to me. I’ll see direct benefit to my site in the form of comments and valuable back-links instead of a high bounce-rate. Lots of plusses from my perspective.

Let me know if you decide to try it.

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• SEO - It’s the Gift That Keeps on Giving

 

 Podcasting for SEO [3:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

transcriptPodcasting for SEO

Podcasting is the new buzz of the internet. A Podcast is an mp3 or mp4 file of your post article that may or may not include video. Most of them are just audio files that you can listen to on the web or download for later listening.

Podcasting can be used to help your SEO and your SEO can help your podcasting efforts.

I’m sure you’re wondering how since the bots can only crawl text such as html and your content, but there are ways to make your podcasting bring search engine results.

As is the case for all your blogging efforts having a keyword rich title for your podcast is of primary importance. You’re going to want the Search Engine robots to find your podcast easily.

MP3 files have what’s called ID3 tags which you will also want to ensure have your keywords and long tail keywords included in them and ID3V2 tags also support comment and URL fields. Make the best use of them you can.

Submit your podcast to podcast distribution sites such as audo.weblogs.com. This gets you those all-important back links that enhance your authority with Google.

Make sure your podcasts are interesting. It’s much better to have conversations with people as your podcast rather than just having a “preaching session”. Having a question and answer session is quite informative and goes over well with your podcast listening audience.

If you’re a WordPress user, there’s a plug in that you will find useful for your podcasts.Called PodPress, its features include:

• Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
• Podcast Download stats, with cool graphs.
• Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
• Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
• View MP3 Files ID3 tags when you’re Posting
• Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Supports unlimited number of media files.
• Automatic Media player for MP3, OGG, MP4, MOV, FLV, SWF, ASF, WMV, AVI, YouTube, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Preview image for videos
• Support for separate Category podcasts
• Podango hosting integration

Along with your podcast title and ID3 tags, you will want to have a transcript of your podcast on your website. Using a speech recognition software to set them in linear motion can make having that transcript easily available to your readers/listeners and gives the search engines that text we were talking about earlier to parse for keywords. While having a synopsis of the podcast is helpful, the transcript is the best case scenario.

Let’s view a video podcast and see how this podcaster has done it.

I found this video podcast about making the best use of the All in One SEO plugin. If you’re currently using this plugin, you will find some helpful information in this podcast and if you’re not using it, you might find that it’s a worthwhile plugin to have.

What do you feel the creator of this video podcast achieved with it? What do you think  the strong points of it are? What are it’s weak points? If you were to create a similar podcast, what things would you change? Which ones would you keep?

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Image by notoriousxl via Flickr

Making your site Search Engine optimized carries with it a lot of baggage, but don’t be packing your Louis Vuitton luggage quite so soon. There are other things you can do to enhance your placement in the big continent of Google besides the ones I’ve already outlined for you in previous articles.

Social Networking services can and do contribute to SEO placement. Services such as Twitter can be utilized to enhance your rankings and drive visitors to your site. There is an excellent article on utilizing Twitter for this very thing that explains it far better than I, the neophyte twitter-er can ever begin to do.

You all know about how Stumble, Digg and Technorati driving traffic to your site, but getting on the front page of any of those three takes a huge effort and there is such competition for it that it’s hard for the little guy like you and me to make it. Some new “boys” on the social-networking block are MIXX, LinkedIn, Plurk, Multiply and Plaxco who are all vying with the “big three”, Facebook and My Space as being excellent places to promote your blog or website.

Keep in mind that Google in particular (but this also applies to most of the major search engines) are looking for relevant content to what is posted on your site, so if you’re using these in a casual way, you might want to create new profiles just for promotion of your blog or website. This will enable you to keep the focus on your chosen subject without diluting it with off-topic posts.

Google’s webmaster central has recently begun publishing more in-depth articles on just how Google determines a site’s ranking. There is even a downloadable Starter Guide containing a lot of valuable tips for improving your site’s ranking.

Once viewed as a deep dark secret, the powers-that-be at Google are loosening up on the stranglehold they once had on letting people know the mechanics of how they rank pages. Of course, their biggest fear is that those spoilers of the internet will figure out just how to game the system and promote their spammy websites that, like cowbirds, will put their parasitic sites in the rightful place of content rich sites on the results page.

So this week, here’s your challenge. Create a Twitter Identity just for your website and create some tweets that highlight your blog posts. My Twitter ID is eyespi20 follow me so I can keep track of how you’re doing

{{if you’re a wordpress user, there is a plugin called Twitter Tools that will link you blog to your Twitter account and allow you to work Twitter both ways..}}

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