If you have done your homework and your site ranks well, you might think you are done and success is soon to come. Well you might want to be careful. Even if you can attract traffic to your site, it doesn’t mean you are going to keep it.

The beauty of bounce rates and why it is one of my favorite metrics is because of its value in measuring the quality of your traffic. If you don't already know, bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors that leave a page without visiting any other pages before a set time elapses. While it is pretty hard to get anything under 20%, anything under 35% could use some tweaking and if you have anything over 50% then this guide is especially for you:

Here are seven things that you need to keep in mind in order to stay on top:

1. Spice It Up With Flash. This word is dreaded by most search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners. Since search engines are designed to handle static content, flash content presents a problem for most of these engines. However, users love the eye candy experience and tend to return to these websites. Proper and minimal use of flash content will allow your site to get indexed, but will also encourage visitors to stick around.

2. Pictures Say A Thousand Words. Think BIG! Your images should be polished, sleek, glamorous. Apple's web site is a perfect example of this philosophy. And with Google now being able to recognize text within images, it gives you even more of a reason to enhance your site with some pretty graphics.

3. Make it Interactive. Make your site as easy to use and as personal as possible! The site needs to respond to its user's needs and anticipate their demands. Organize informal focus groups when designing your site. Ask users what features they would want to see on a site, encourage them to share even their nominal wishes. Develop a site that has unexpected features which make users stick around.

Example - Amazon.com was one of the first sites that thought of providing buying patterns of past customers to its current clients before they made a single purchase. Such a simple tool made Amazon.com stand out from its competitors and encouraged users to explore other products on the site.

4. Stylish Design. Nobody likes going to a site that looks like it was designed in 1998. Keep the whole look modern and stylish.

• Don't overload the page with graphics so that the page takes 3 minutes to download. Keep in mind that many users do not have fast internet connections and may leave before the site is fully loaded.
• If at any time you decide to upgrade your site, please do this as quickly as possible. Each day that your site is down you stand to lose hundreds of customers. The American public has a notoriously short attention span, and a slow initial load can be detrimental to a site’s success.
• Finally, do periodic maintenance by checking your site for broken links, outdated information or design flaws.

5. Friendly Navigation. Your site needs to be well structured. There can't be any confusion! Users will not stick around if they can't easily find the products they need. In order to attract long-term customers, make sure your site is ultra-professional. You need to inspire confidence. This means that consumers need to be able to navigate from one page to the next with ease.

• Hypertext (imbedded links) are a great way to encourage customers to continue surfing the site.
• Navigation bar is also a must for any professional site.
• Include a search box or provide a site map for more advanced users.

6. Relevancy. If you want to capture consumer attention, you must devote time and money to developing high quality content. Be sure to use a visitor tracking service to understand what terms people are using to locate your site. If you notice that there is a high bounce rate associated with some of these visits, make sure that the search terms and the site content are in sync.

Be careful not to cover a dozen different topics and industries at the same time. Consumers need to KNOW what your site is about within the first few minutes of their visit or they may become frustrated and leave.

7. K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple Stupid. We would all love to have a top-of-the line premium website. However, sometimes it's best to keep things simple. Top websites require a lot of maintenance and most webmasters can’t commit to this type of expense. Keep in mind that you can still attract users with simple graphics and easy to navigate pages. Don't ignore the power of white space coupled with a few key pictures or slogans. Concentrate your efforts on creating a unique message that can make your site stand out from the competition.