high bounce rate

Well my first opinion is WAY too much text!

If it was at least broken down into smaller lists with bullet points ... but just huge blocks of text, especially paragraphs and paragraphs talking about the website, rather than talking about Italy ... that's just a snooze fest in my opinion.

The stickiest sites are ones that are engaging and better yet interactive.

Think ... A custom Google map that has Italian land marks on it with fun icons which lead to sub pages, which can then be full of really good informative text which you have plenty of! I just came up with that but I'm sure if you get creative you can think of ways to draw people in.

At the very least, you could break up your text with some more prominent headers / sub headers that are compelling and entice people to keep reading. The big blocks of small text are just hard to dive into when you first hit a page.

My two cents,

-Phil

As above, the text needs to be broken up.

I think the colour scheme is all over the place, the images need to cleaned up also. Id recommend spending a bit of time looking at some top travel sites and even travel agents and see what they do and duplicate it with your own twist added.

Ok I kind of understand what you are saying about my home page and I will figure out a way to tell people the site is about learning how to plan and book their Italian vacation but what about the pages that are explaining to people how to do what I am trying to teach them to do on that page. I can't tell people all the things they need to know about finding a good hotel in italy in just a few paragraphs. What would you suggest I do to try and trim those articles down.

To analyse bounce rate problems, 1st you need to see what search phrases are resulting in high bounce rates - you cant just generalize.

Second, as mentioned above, walls of text in long paragraphs are not good.

Keep the opening paragraph SHORT and to the point, preferably with salient bullit points.

If you have many many search phrases landing on that page, you might consider using a jquery accordian to organize all your text under headings - that way you still have the text for SEO but its only shown when the visitor clicks the heading.

I have been watching the bounce rates for a while and the keywords. Most people get to my home page with the keywords italian travel, italian travels, italian vacation, italian travel planning and italian vacation planning. All the bounce rates seem to be about the same for all those keywords. The bounce rate for most of my internal pages are about half of what they are on my home page. Also I don't get much traffic in one day since my site is back on page 12 or so in google search results and around page 5 to 8 on yahoo, bing and some of the other search engines. I also have been running some adwords adds which is getting me nowhere. I have about 10 adds running and have gone over the wording with google and the adds is shown about 6000 times a day and not getting any clicks at all. Since I spoke to someone at google and they helped me put the wording together because my old adds weren't doing much I thought they would be better but they are not. The adds are not running in the search network but on the other. Mark

Mark,

An example of breaking up your info would be ... if you are writing about finding a great hotel in Italy, instead of having a large paragraph of text, you could say "There are 5 important facts to keep in mind when searching for a great Italian hotel. They are:" and then have a list of items which are a couple lines each (at the most) and which are at least separated out with new <p>'s so that the eye can jump to each pertinent piece of information.

Like:

1. Blah Blah important fact 1.

2. Bl;ah lalala lah dee dah 2

3. WhooHoo Look at me

4. Etc etc

There are lots of ways to make the data more interesting to look at

Hi Mark I don't know whether you are still looking for a solution for high bounce rate on your site or you have started working on it. But what i will suggest you is to change your content altogether. Your site present content is written from your site as you see your site and you want to tell about your site. But think as a user. For example rather than saying "We hope you will find the answers to all your questions concerning planning an Italian vacation within the pages of our Site." rephrase it like "Myitaliantravels.com offers you complete information with carefully chosen vacation packages to Italy to make your Italy travel most memorable".

Rather than providing a lot of information on a single page, target one page for just 1-2 keywords and split your page into multiple pages providing to-the-point information.