Tables were skewed, pictures half covered up, the drop down navigation didn’t work, etc.

I actually thought this guy was playing a trick on me — no one would EVER take this site seriously.

When I commented to the client that his little joke was “very funny,” I quickly found out that this was no joke.  That was his REAL site.

After talking to him a few minutes and pulling the site up in other browsers, it didn’t take too long to figure out that he was having some serious browser compatibility problems.  He had built the site for Internet Explorer, and it was a work of art in that browser platform, but it was all messed up on nearly every other browser I tried.

Despite all the advances of internet technology, all browsers are still not created equal when it comes to how your site is viewed.  Browser incompatibility represents a huge challenge for anyone building a website.  Browser compatibility issues can affect your images, JavaScript functions, style sheets, links, navigation, and page layout.

AND it can totally kill your website profits and subscription rates!

Internet explorer, for example, tries to figure out what you meant to put in your code and fills in the blanks.  In other words, if you’ve used incorrect HTML code in your webpage, Explorer will try to make the corrections or fill in the blanks resulting in a page layout that may not be what you intended.

So obviously, you’ve got to address this issue with your website — Which can be a total pain in the rear.

Your first stop should be to check your website in a variety of browsers.  There’s three ways you can go about checking browser compatibility:

1.  Download and install all those browsers onto your computer and view your website in each browser.  This would be a total pain in the neck and totally unnecessary.

2.  Purchase browser compatibility software or a service.  There are lots of great services out there to choose from if you Google it.  I wouldn’t suggest this option unless you have a lot of websites or your build websites for your clients.

3.  Use a free service online like www.browsershots.org.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don’t really need to check your website in every browser in existence on the planet — that would be ridiculous!

The last time I checked, 99.2% of internet users only used seven browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6- 14.9%
• Internet Exploere 7 – 18.7%
• Internet Exploere 8 – 7.1%
• Firefox – 47.3%
• Google Chrome – 6%
• Safari – 3.1%
• Opera – 2.1%

Of course, these numbers change as new browsers come on the market, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

So I guess that I’m suggesting that even though technology continues to improve, browser compatibility STILL matters and you should definitely check your websites for compatibility!

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I’ve spent the better part of the last week analyzing my business.

I’ve delved deeply into my stats, tracked where the revenue is coming from, and analyzed my websites and traffic. Here’s what I actually came up with.

1. The majority of my traffic is not coming from my blogs.

In fact, they are generating significantly less traffic and revenue than my SBI websites… like 70% less. Huge shocker for me. You see, I started blogging because it seemed to hold the promise of more traffic than traditional websites because of the constant pinging of your content from the blog updating services.

I’m a long time SBI’er (since 2002). I love SBI, but some aspects of the hosting service is a pain… like not having direct ftp access. So when blogging came out, I thought it would be great to have an easier content manager. Plus blogs held the promise of as much traffic as my SBI sites were bringing in.

I’ve totally dispelled that little myth… at least for my particular business.

2. Blogging is coming up short in all my niches.

This was another big surprise to me. As you probably already know, my business includes several other niches. I’ve been evaluating all my websites, not just the business oriented ones, and the blogs are losing.

In fact, I took a look at one niche where my SBI website and my blog were started at virtually the same time. That means that both sites were about the same age. In this case, I posted new content to the blog 3-5 times per week and I posted new content on the SBI site about once per week (several articles). The content was virtually the same, including the same keyword optimization.

SBI won again!

3. My blogs generally had a lower conversion rate.

My last criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of my blogs was to take a look at the revenue generated and the conversion rates. Again, my blogs came up short.

When I compared blogs and SBI websites, in non-business niches, the SBI websites averaged a 42% higher conversion rate. In my business related niches, the SBI websites converted an average of 67% more visitors into buyers than the blogs did.

4. My blogs convert fewer visitors into subscribers.

This one kind of goes along with the conversion rates above, but I thought it was worth mentioning. About 80% of my newsletter/ezine subscribers come from my SBI websites… not my blogs. Initially, I thought that made sense because they were probably subscribing to my rss feed instead.

Nope.

Visitors to my blog just aren’t bothering to subscribe at all.

I even compared a blog to a SBI site that had virtually the same layout with the same subscribe box in the same place on the page. SBI still converted over 80% more visitors into subscribers.

Why are my traditional websites out-performing my blogs?

This is the fundamental question that I’ve been asking myself since I started doing this in depth evaluation… why are my SBI websites out-performing my blogs by such a huge margin?

After all, the content on comparable sites is virtually the same (not duplicate content however). The age of the sites I compared was nearly identical. Keywords were used on both types of sites.

And yet, my SBI websites have far more traffic, a higher PR, higher sales conversions, and more subscriptions.

Why???

That’s when I started looking into the actual traffic that comes to both types of sites. Who are these people? What are they expecting when they visit?

At first, it was very frustrating because I thought they should be basically looking for the same things when they visit either type of site since the content is similar.

But that’s when it dawned on me.

Visitors have a vastly different expectation when they visit a blog than when they visit a traditional website.

1. Blog visitors expect to see frequent posts… usually daily. Visitors to blogs can see the date of all your posts, how long your blog has been around, and how many others have bothered to make comments about your posts. All of this puts your visitors in a particular mindset.

2. Blogs don’t carry the same weight as traditional websites because literally anybody can have a blog these days. If they’re not held in as high esteem, then it makes sense why they wouldn’t convert as well. Having a traditional website is a bit more complicated than a blog, therefore it seems more important in the eyes of visitors.

3. Blogs are much more about opinions and experiences than they are about pure information, so that’s what visitors expect to see. Therefore, if your blog posts are nothing but informational, you aren’t soliciting comments, engaging your visitors in your blog, or creating a following.

In other words, the best blogs need to carefully weave the information into the fabric of a social conversation. Traditional websites, on the other hand, are the perfect platform for pure information.

And that’s where I’ve been going all wrong!

I’ve been posting waaay too much pure information and not enough conversation on my blogs. Which, by the way, has made blogging a chore!

What I should have been doing all along was treating my blogs and my SBI websites as the completely different entities that they are. (Can you see the light bulb burning brightly over my head?) After all, I have opinions about just about everything on the planet… just ask my husband. It will be fun, I think, to have a forum for all those opinions and thoughts.

Now that I’m employing this new philosophy, meet me here in a couple of months when I re-evaluate the situation again. We’ll see if my blogging insights prove out or not!

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For a lot of websites, this number can look very good until you dig a little deeper and find out what your bounce rate is. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your website and never clicks through to any other pages before leaving. Therefore it follows that a bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on one of your pages and then leave without going any deeper into your website.

Unless you’re talking about a landing page that’s designed for a specific purpose, like sending visitors to an affiliate website, then a website that has a high bounce rate is highly undesirable. I don’t know about you, but I want my unique visitors to come on in to my website, take their coats off, and stay awhile. I want them to click around and visit several of my pages, subscribe to my ezine, make some comments on my blog, and generally make themselves at home.

I’m betting that you feel the same way.

Do you have a serious case of bouncing visitors?

So the first thing you need to do to find out if you’ve got a serious case of bouncing visitors is to determine your bounce rate. This is really easy to do if you use any kind of analytics software on your website… which you definitely should. By simply logging into your website analytics, you can see how many visitors are coming to your site, how many pages they looked at, and if they left your site shortly after arriving to it.

In Awstats, for example, the software offers a section that calculates the amount of time each visitor is staying on your site called “Visits duration.” If visitors are staying less than 30 seconds, then you have a serious case of bouncing visitors.

If you use SBI (my favorite host), then you can get a pretty good idea of your bounce rate by doing a few simple calculations.

For example: 123,784 divided by 381,149 gives you an overall bounce rate of 32%. That may sound high, but it’s actually a very low bounce rate.

Unfortunately, most hosting services don’t offer advanced analytics software as part of their packages because most people just don’t know what to do with all that data. That’s why I highly suggest that you invest in your business with analytic software that gives you a really clear picture of what your visitors are doing on your website… including bounce rate. Here are a few options (that I’m not affiliated with) that you can look into:

http://www.statcounter.com
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.webtrends.com

If you have a high bounce rate…

Before you get yourself in a panic over your bounce rate, remember that this is really just a yardstick to measure your website against. There are a lot of factors that can affect your bounce rate, including where the traffic is coming from, purpose of your website and specific landing pages, website design, and your website goals. You have to keep all these things in mind as you determine if you have a problem on your hands.

If you’re concerned about your website bounce rate, here are a few questions that you should be asking yourself:

1. Is your website compelling? You never know for sure what page visitors will land on when they visit your website, so it pays to look at your website as a whole and decide if you’ve presented yourself in a compelling and interesting way. Offering visitors lots of interesting content within your niche is a great way to engage your visitors and keep them at your site longer.

2. Is navigation easy? There’s nothing more frustrating than to click through to a website and find it nearly impossible to find anything on it. Navigation should be easy and intuitive so that visitors can immediately feel at home.

3. Is your website or landing page broken? Sometimes a high bounce rate can be directly related to a website issue. Visitors can easily be driven to the back button is your form is broken, images are missing on the page, or the pages are taking too long to load. Another big issue could be browser compatibility. If your website looks broken in Firefox, for example, then any visitor who uses Firefox will be put off by your website. Any of these factors can chase your visitors away before they even have a chance to look deeper into your site.

4. Are you targeting the right keywords? Keywords are something that I harp on a lot, but this is another situation where it pays to do your keyword homework. If you’re attracting visitors through the wrong keywords, then they won’t be the kind of highly targeted visitors that you need… and they’ll leave your site very quickly. This goes for paid advertising, organic SEO, Adwords, etc. Keywords are still your best bet to lowering your bounce rate.

5. Do you tell visitors where to go? Okay, you may be thinking H-E-double toothpicks, but I was referring to using a call to action, pointing them where you want them to go on your website, and setting up a strategic path for them. Visitors are more likely to dig deeper into your website if you’ve gotten them interested in “what’s next” on your website.

6. Where are your visitors coming from? This factor is probably the biggest one to consider if you have a high bounce rate. For example, if you advertise extensively in PPC’s, then your advertising could be seriously affecting your bounce rate. In addition, when your traffic comes from article marketing, link exchanges, search engines, forums, etc. it all affects your bounce rate. Once you know where you’re traffic is coming from, then you can make adjustments to your marketing in order to reduce your bounce rate.

Is bounce rate really that important?

I think it’s pretty important, but you’ll have to make up your own mind where this factor fits into your own business. In my view, anything that gives me clues to what’s working or not working on my websites is well worth investigating.

As with anything else in your online business, you really have to keep the big picture in mind. There are so many factors that can affect your bounce rate that you could drive yourself crazy trying to figure it all out. In addition, different types of websites can actually produce bigger bounce rates. For example, blogs typically have a higher bounce rate than simple content driven websites.

You might be able to correct a high bounce rate with something as easy as simplifying your website navigation or changing your header graphics… making the whole thing well worth it.

To me, it’s all about the bottom line. If the bounce rate affects my bottom line, then it’s worth my time. How about your?

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