How to keep visitors on your website. Part 4 of 6: adding links.

By Karmen Van Der Westhuizen

A big factor that contributes to high bounce rates is not providing the reader with different content options relating to the article topic. For example, if you were a sports fan and you end up on a webpage looking for the answer to your question “Who won the 2007 Rugby World Cup?” the page might give you the answer to your question but may not give you any more information. You may also find it useful if they provided links to players that would have been playing in the game, or gave you statistics about the tournament, such as the fact that the player Percy Montgomery was the top scorer, or Bryan Habana scored the most tries. All of these topics might have kept the reader on this particular website longer and they would have viewed more than one webpage. Instead, they got their answer and left, resulting in a higher bounce rate.
Another simple way to keep people interested in your content is to add internal links to related information on your website that the reader might be interested in. An added bonus to adding internal links is they provide some value to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is, however, imperative that you create a structure with the layout of your pages so it is easy for readers to navigate.