Here are five guaranteed ways to increase the bounce rate on your website:

1. <strong>Use a small font</strong>. Or use a weird small font. Basically, make it hard for those of us forty-plus to read your content.

2. <strong>Clutter, clutter everywhere</strong>. Cram it full of stuff to make it seem like a contender for an episode of TV's Hoarders. Make it so busy I don't know where to look first. Or whether to look at all.

3.<strong> Make the video (or audio) play automatically.</strong> Bonus points if it is really loud.

4. <strong>Make it hard to figure what you do, who you are or where you are located</strong>. If you want to be even more obtuse, make sure to use excessive and meaningless jargon.

5. <strong>Spelling and grammar mistakes galore mixed in with typos</strong>.Certainly, don't bother proofreading.

Yes, the five ways to increase your bounce rate are the five ways to turn off potential website visitors. It's not good, and I have experienced all of them on websites recently.

[caption id="attachment_2666" align="aligncenter" width="300"]<a href="http://deborahbrody.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/160754346_dab3a98893_z.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-2666" src="http://deborahbrody.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/160754346_dab3a98893_z-300x225.jpg" alt="Bouncing Ball photo" width="300" height="225" /></a> Bouncing Ball by Dave Murphy on Flickr[/caption]

Do you know what the bounce rate on your website is? I don't mean the term (just in case, Google Analytics defines it as the percentage of single-page sessions, where the user enters your site but does not interact or stay on your site), but the actual number.

If you don't know it, I suggest checking your Analytics right now. Basically, the higher the number, the worse your bounce rate. A high bounce rate indicates that people are just not interested in your website, which in turn indicates that you have a problem.

In reality, you want to lower your bounce rate. You want to have the visitors to your website stay and not bounce off. Notice that the bounce rate does not have to do with the number of visitors that land on your site, but rather the number that stays. So, if you have thousands of visitors, with a 95 percent bounce rate you are doing much worse than a site with a few dozen visitors and 65 percent bounce rate.

What makes you want to stay on the websites you visit? What makes you run away as fast as you can click that x on the browser tab?
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