Traffic and Adsense and Bounces

[OKFarmgirl]

I am trying to build and rank an authority site on organic gardening. The domain is about a year old but I just started working on it in February. Traffic has steadily climbed, I am at a PR0 and my Alexa ranking has gone from 27million to under 700k. (I know Alexa doesn't mean a ton, but still...).

This month, I've had 896 visitors and my bounce rate is far too high for my liking. 70.65%. I can see through Analyitics that a lot of my bounces are from articles that really do answer the search question. I work hard to write original, useful content for my site (no article on there was written by anyone but me).

In the last week, I have made $.54 on my site. With gardening season really ramping up, this is discouraging. I have about 5 pages on page 1 for my keywords, and others that are on 2,3 and 4 (I realize anything NOT on page 1 almost doesn't matter). I know that the Adsense pay for my niche is not high. I'm more concerned about my traffic than anything. I got some great advice from another member about ad placements I can try so I'm going to swing those for a month and see if there's an improvement.

I don't know...just looking for pointers, encouragement, a little lurve...LOL Is this kind of thing what most people go through when they're not doing a niche site?

[galisgos]

The sidebar is very messed up in Google Chrome - appearing way down the page.

[markowe]

Originally Posted by galisgos

The sidebar is very messed up in Google Chrome - appearing way down the page.

Yep, for me too. The problem is the same in Firefox too! I tried tinkering with your sidebar width and margins (using Chrome Developer options! Not hacking your site ) and must admit couldn't immediately fix it, but someone with some CSS knowledge can quickly fix that. That could account for a LARGE proportion of your visitors bouncing, if they can't navigate anywhere

As for Adsense clicks, most people do not recommend using borders around your Adsense ads. They will blend in with your content much better without, though that's something you need to test. Same applies with the Adsense banner at the top - it would be worth putting a block in the content of the page instead.

Nothing set in stone, these are just tweaks to try.

Oh, P.S. loading seems a LITTLE on the slow side. It's possible people will bounce if they get bored waiting. Could just be my connection, but it's worth trying WordPress › W3 Total Cache « WordPress Plugins to speed things up, though get some help with all the different settings, some of them can screw things up.

[OKFarmgirl]

Originally Posted by galisgos

The sidebar is very messed up in Google Chrome - appearing way down the page.

I've got a post in the web design forum trying to address this. My friends said they didn't see it, but I think they just looked at the homepage. Thanks for verifying it's screwed up

As for Adsense clicks, most people do not recommend using borders around your Adsense ads. They will blend in with your content much better without, though that's something you need to test. Same applies with the Adsense banner at the top - it would be worth putting a block in the content of the page instead.

I wondered about this. I had someone suggest "matching" the ad to my site, and I sent a question to him about whether to put borders, but that was this morning, so he hasn't gotten back. The padding should keep it separate enough from the text, right? Should I change any of the colors in the link text? I've got the URL black and the title green to match my site.

[OKFarmgirl]

Also, it seems that the text AFTER the ad in the body is a different font. What would cause that?

[OKFarmgirl]

Okay, it was my Quick Adsense plugin (I deactivated everything and put them back up one by one). It seems to be working now - would y'all mind checking for me? The top banner and link ad after the 1st paragraph don't seem to bother it, but the in-text square wrapped one did. Not sure why. I'll take the border off the sidebar widget and the top as well. And I should change my colors on the link one right? I think you're right about the bounce because of no sidebar! So is the table of contents easy to navigate? I think it's a pain, but I can't figure out a better way to make articles easy to find.

[mandark]

It seems to be working now (using Google Chrome).

In terms of making navigation easier, I would make your search functionality less confusing. I searched for 'gardening' and there were some random links at the top, followed by a bunch of posts. I suggest you show the search results as simply the name (and maybe description) of the posts, so the searcher can click the one they want to read without having to scroll down and look through all of them.

[OKFarmgirl]

You know, I've never tried the search function! Do I need to go into the code to change it or is there some clever way to do it in WP or with a plugin?