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Website / SEO help

If your website is useful, people will come back. A high bounce rate often means that people are arriving at your site, and realising that it isn't what they were looking for, or that you can't do what they want.

The best bet to stop bounce, is to simplify your site's navigation. Instead of 800 pier buttons that people have to read individually in order to find the one they want, have a drop down menu called "piers" and list them alphabetically. Ease of navigation will allow them to find the information they are looking for quickly - whether that navigation is by name/location, map information in the form of an overlay etc etc. No piece of information should be more than 1-2 pages deep into the site in order to find it.

If in doubt, simplify simplify simplify. Don't make the user have to do a lot of work in order to use your website.

A high bounce rate can also be symptomatic of misselling a website/service, e.g. calling your site fishcare.co.uk and it is about taking care of your fishing rods instead of taking care of your pet carp etc, or not providing the kind of service people expect.

Often, the best bet is to look at a succesful competitor and take notes ^^.
 
Bounce rate is definitely dropping so something must be going right!

Navigation is my next biggy to sort out.

When looking for competitors there aren't really any for this particular sector that are worth noting. piers.co.uk is ran by the National Pier Society and is terrible!

Little by little I think I am getting there at least!
 
It might be worth trying to put a form on the website somewhere to get some feedback, so that you can try to judge what it is that your users like about your site and what you can do to improve it!

Suggested features etc.
 
Shoseki said:
It might be worth trying to put a form on the website somewhere to get some feedback, so that you can try to judge what it is that your users like about your site and what you can do to improve it!

Suggested features etc.
Click to expand...

There is a contact us form, do you mean something different to that?
 
wonder_lander said:
There is a contact us form, do you mean something different to that?
Click to expand...

Contact us is used when they want to contact you, could be about anything. I meant specifically website feedback : Change requests (enhancement to the website), user feedback is incredibly important and allows you to get an objective view of your work (lets face it, you will be biased about your own work).
 
I prefer making wordpress into a cms which is quite easy. I prefer to use a static page as the homepage and keep posts in their own category such as news. I think if you were to adopt this you could tidy your site up and present it in the way that you want.

I use enchanced categories with custom query string to provide categories that show only the parent but allow you to click the parent to reveal the child cats. I think if you were to go this route it would stop you posting so many pages. Pages would then in turn be used for Home, Contact us, About us etc. This way you would only have pages under the header and you can remove the page section from your sidebar.

Using the above category plugins and the redirect plugin you can have each category act is if they are a page rather than sequential posts after posts. I would also personally remove the meta section and allow as others have said to comment without logging in as this can deter people from doing so.



The plugins i use are:
SEO all in one
enchanced categories
google sitemap
order categories
permalink redirect
robots meta
seo image
custom query string
headspace
sociable
 
Last edited:
chris74 said:
I prefer making wordpress into a cms which is quite easy. I prefer to use a static page as the homepage and keep posts in their own category such as news. I think if you were to adopt this you could tidy your site up and present it in the way that you want.

I use enchanced categories with custom query string to provide categories that show only the parent but allow you to click the parent to reveal the child cats. I think if you were to go this route it would stop you posting so many pages. Pages would then in turn be used for Home, Contact us, About us etc. This way you would only have pages under the header and you can remove the page section from your sidebar.

Using the above category plugins and the redirect plugin you can have each category act is if they are a page rather than sequential posts after posts. I would also personally remove the meta section and allow as others have said to comment without logging in as this can deter people from doing so.



The plugins i use are:
SEO all in one
enchanced categories
google sitemap
order categories
permalink redirect
robots meta
seo image
custom query string
headspace
sociable
Click to expand...

Have you got an example site that I take take a look at your custom categories?
 
I'm not sure why you're using the enhanced categories plugin. Looking at it, it doesn't provide anything that can't otherwise be done in hand coding with a lot more control over the end product. It seems a bit of a fudge to me tbh..

I'm also not sure why you're using both SEO all in one and headspace - they both do 90% the same stuff as each other..
 
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