For the people oblivious to the meaning of Bounce Rate: a visitor can bounce by closing an open window or tab, typing a new URL, clicking the “Back” button to leave the website or have a session timeout. The bounce rate for a blog is the number of site visitors who only visit 1 page of that blog per visit, divided by the total number of blog visits.

According to google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik, a bounce rate over 50% is worrying, over 35% there is cause for concern and it is really hard to get your stats under 20%.

Like I mentioned in my post about EntreCard the other day, my BounceRate is in the high seventies so looking at Avinash´statement I should really break down and cry or better yet, decide whether that bounce rate really is all that important to me right now at this stage of my blog.

Having a high bounce rate (a percentage well over 60%) means one of two things (and sometimes a combination of both); either you are targeting or attracting the wrong visitors or your site is of poor design overall.

Although there is definitely a lot to tweak and improve on my design, I prefer thinking that my high bounce rate is actually caused by the use of EntreCard, getting anywhere between 100 and 300 visits through that system daily. And as we all know most droppers are bouncers, only looking for the widget to drop and move on to the next one.

Am I going to break down and cry? Well of course not! I actually do appreciate all the traffic I am receiving, it is driving Alexia ranking up (you just never know when that could be useful, plus it is getting personal now, wanting to reach 100,000 within 3 months of starting this blog) plus I notice more and more people are coming back, leaving comments and start participating.

Am I truly satisfied? Well of course not!
There is always room for improvement, especially when only just starting out. So a few weeks ago I signed up for Google Analytics to be able to have a closer look at where all these wonderful readers are coming from.

By the way, if you have been struggling to add the code to your blog in order to have the tracking process started, I recommend you to use the Google Analyticator plugin for WP,  allowing you to add the tracking code without having to change anything in your core code.

I must admit, I really don’t like touching core codes (especially not late in the evening when running a high risk of screwing up the whole system) and I have been putting off signing up for google analytics for too long, but with that plugin it is a real breeze to set up and as much as I don’t want to depend on Google, the Analytics rock!

Now is as good a time as any to actually start focussing on lowering that bounce rate while not going down on traffic, but since I really don´t want to go cold turkey on EntreCard I will keep using it and apart from that I will be spending quite some time over the next weeks on building more backlinks and of course I will be sharing my lists with you guys, so stay tuned for that!

I am curious though, care to share your bounce rate and steps on how to improve, or do you really just don´t care about stats and ranks? 

I must admit, I love the use of plugins because they just make life and blogging a lot easier and I am using quite a lot of them (maybe too many).

The only down side is to find the one doing exactly what you want or figuring out a way to make them do so anyways. The latter is not really my strenght resulting in having played around with quite an extensive list of plugins.

Yesterday, when doing some decluttering of my computer I came across the huge collection of plugins that I have tried and tested, and decided to post on the ones that I use here, giving some linklove and credit to their designers.

Add Sig by Dagon Design
I am using this plugin at the moment to add my signature to the bottom of all of my posts but there are of course other things you can do with this plugin without having to change things in the core code. It supports up to three different signature templates at the moment and eventhough it just might not be all that useful, I like the personal touch it adds to my posts.

Akismet by Matt Mullenweg
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments” and make sure you do this once in a while since not all posts Akismet filters out is spam. It isn´t 100% bullitproof, especially not since spammers are becoming more sophisticated these days, but it sure helps!

All in One SEO Pack by Uberdose
This one automatically optimizes titles for search engines, generates Meta tags and avoids duplicate content found on wordpress blogs. If you are running wordpress 2.3 you don´t even have to look at the options, but you can of course override and title and set any meta description and keywords you want.

Anti-Sociable by Andy Beard
Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so make it easier to be bookmarked in case a post was really enjoyed. I am actually using the hacked version called Antisocial as to not lose too much linkjuice on each post.
Commentluv by Andy Bailey
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commentator’s blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. Currently parses with wordpress, blogspot, typepad and blogs that have a feed link in the head section of their page. I like this plugin a lot; it has already leaded me to many interesting blogs I would not have found otherwise.

Contextual Related Posts by Mark Ghosh
Show last 5 contextually related posts on single blog posts, making it easier for visitors to find related material if they liked the one they just read, but it will also bring forward older posts.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design
This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator that is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel.
To see this plugin in action, visit my sitemap page.

Dofollow by Denis de Bernardy
Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments. Now, I have been running this plugin on my blog for a while and almost changed to another plugin that will disable the nofollow attribute only after a commentator has already made some more post. But I have not decided about it just yet,…

Enhanced WP-ContactForm by Joost Valk
WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+ and you can see it in action here.

Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog that is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Save your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. Now the cool thing about this one is that you can actually date posts that you have written and only ping once they are published online. Plus, you can edit your post without the danger of continuously pinging every time you change something in an already existing post. Make sure you register the plugin in order for it to work and start avoiding spamming pingers and getting blocked from their services.

Subscribe To Comments By Mark Jaquith
This plugin allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, making it easier to keep track of certain comments and dialogues.

Top Commentators Widget by Lorna Timbah
Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site, another way to show I appreciate active commentators. Adapted from Show Top Commentators plugin.

Top Posts By Category by M&M
I am using this plugin to easily show the posts that were most commented all together on one page, but you can also set it to show the most visited posts in your blog. You can see it in action here.

WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko
After having had a problem with another blog, losing all content because of my own stupidity, I have this plugin installed to make sure I get a database backup emailed to me weekly so I won´t have to worry about that anymore.

WWW Redirect by Justin Shattuck
Redirects variations of identical domain requests to a consistent uri to ensure www.memyselfandiblog.com and memyselfandiblog.com are not regarded as two different domains by the search engines.

YATCP by Joachim Praetorius
This plugin allows for the ability to comment on a comment, making it easier to respond to different comments and start dialogue.

So, there you have it… 17 plugins I use, seems like quite a lot to me so I was wondering, how many is “normal”? Any plugin I really should not be living without that I don´t know of?

Last week I was reading an article by Courtney Tuttle, How Setting your blog to ping could hurt your traffic in which he explains that using the timestamp feature actually pings the services ahead of time, sending all searchengines to your site looking for a post that does not yet exist in blogosphere and once it does, it won´t get the ping you set out to give it in the first place.
I haven´t been using the timestamp feature on this blog, but I had been using it on others, making sure they were updated on a regular bases in order for me to be able to focus on other things meanwhile.

After reading the article, and doing some more research online about this topic, I decided to not ping automatically on the timestamped articles anymore but instead do the pinging manually, yet another thing on my daily to-do list …

After a few days pinging manually I figured somebody must have already become fed up with this wordpress flaw and made some sort of plugin to optimize pinging so I went back online to do some research and I found a plug that should do the job: The Ping Optimizer.

This plugin will not only make sure you are sending out pings once your post comes online but when you edit an existing post, it won’t send an unnecessary ping to ping services.

So, from now on I can go back to working ahead safely, without having to worry about upsetting pinging services or pissing them off by admitting the same post “over and over again” when editing an existing post.