Is this normal to have 83% of website visitors stay 0-30seconds?

[clearcrystal]

My website is still growing as I add new content, I get around 130 unique visitors a day (3000/month).
But most do not stay on the site. How normal is this and is there a normal statistic I should aim for say like 50% who stay 0-30secs?

There are about 300 pages a day that are viewed, so the ones who stay tend to look around a bit to read the articles. My site is http://askingangels.com

If the 83% I mentioned is a terrible stat, then should I play with redesigning the site to look more professional? Thanks for your help.
I also have a WP blog attached to the site which attracts a lot of bots - those bot statistics seems to be included, for example I have 500 views to my blog admin page in the last 10 days lol, those aren't my views, so a lot of the traffic must be bots

[Fred]

VERY. Many searches may push users to your site. How many times have you searched something and gone to a totally unrelated site? Search model cars or aircraft, end up with inappropriate models? These visitors will not waste time looking however interesting the site is, they want to be looking at a relevant site.

[Gentle Man]

I tried opening your site but it seems down. Anyway time spent on website depends upon the type of content in your website. For instance, if you have a blog on travelling with average 500-600 words about tourist locations around then it is definitely reason to worry about but If you have phone directory website where people come to get contact number of XYZ company, then nobody can stop visitors at site. Even you can not engage them by giving links to phone number of companies in same business. As far as Google's search algo concern, I would say that they must have taken care of this.
Hope it helps.

[dan]

There is no set answer,

This would depend on how the visitor arrived to your site (referrer), what page they landed on (landing page) and the search terms (keywords) that they used to get there.

For a site to get traffic it needs to appear high in the search engines for popular phrases that are relevant to the content or it needs to have many incoming links from high traffic sites, preferably both.

You can pay to appear in the search results (PPC) by bidding on search phrases and writing ads for Google (AdWords) or Bing/Yahoo (Bing Ads). You can also rank high in the organic (non-paid) results by having relevant content and SEO optimized pages and incoming links.

That being said,

Once someone arrives at your site, they need to see what they are searching for immediately or they will leave quickly.

For example if someone searched for "how to make a paper angel" and your site appeared high in the search results, the user may click through to the landing page that the search engine thought was relevant.

If the user doesn't see any content relating to paper angels, they will be gone in a few seconds.

To get visitors to stay the content must be relevant to what they are searching for. It also needs to be interesting, easy to read (Skim) or helpful information that the user wants to read.

If you have a blog with many followers, you can also get visitors that stay to read your fresh new content.

The best way to proceed is to keep posting good content. On the Internet "Content Is King". If you have good content, viral marketing will bring the loyal visitors.

Good Luck.

[Alpine]

83% is a pretty high bounce rate.

If you suspect your numbers are being affected by bots you can block these from visiting your site using htaccess -you have to look at your server logs and see where the "undesirable" bots are coming from. There is a known problem with one Eastern European site in particular-the site claims to be an SEO site but it start sending its sniffers to sites over and over-the best guess is its to get people who see it in their stats to click the backlink and maybe sign up for their (essentially worthless) service. Look for the site/url semalt.semalt.com/crawler.php?<link to your site> in your logs.If you see this block it. It will eventually direct worthless traffic to you if it hasn't already.

Another problem with my WP sites used to be "trackback spam" bots that are "scraping" your content and posting it elsewhere. Check your postings arent being used this way by Googling lines of text from them once in awhile.If you find them being reposted somewhere and you see repeated visits in your logs from certain IPs as this is happening you'll have to take steps to block those IPs too.

I'm not sure what you mean by visits to your blog admin page-if you mean your login page this is an attempt to crack or otherwise hack your passwords. If you're not using the Wordpress All in one security plugin I'd recommend you install it and change the login value from my.site.com/login to mysite.com/some random word you set in the pluggin. >

[Trisha]

no