“Bounce Rate” is the evil that can scare the life out of any blogger who intends to maximize blog traffic. Bounce Rate describes the percentage of blog/web site visitors who arrive at a blog/web site entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

Wikipedia uses this formula to calculate bounce rate: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits

As you can see, no blogger would ever want to have a higher bounce rate. But unfortunately, for most new bloggers fighting with high Bounce Rate becomes a tough challenge. If you are one such blogger trying to figure out a way to reduce the bounce rate for your blog, here is good news. Here is a pretty simple widget called LinkWithin to make life easier for you.

LinkWithin is an easy to install widget that automatically links to related articles (blog posts) from your archive. It sits neatly under each post on your blog, blending in with either light or dark color schemes with it’s clean and simple design. The widget content is dynamic, featuring upto five related post title links with eye-catching thumbnail images. Most striking aspect of the widget is that LinkWithin searches your blog’s entire archive, introducing readers to the depth of your indexed blog entries. This is especially helpful to new readers searching for a particular topic, obviously, but it also engages your loyal long time readers, inviting them to rediscover older offerings they may have missed-out or forgotten.

There are many more similar “Related Posts Plugin” available. But unlike similar plugins, LinkWithin doesn’t just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors.

Moreover, LinkWithin plugin is available for Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger and it also provides you with a code snippet that you can use on other blogging platforms. In trying out LinkWithin on this WordPress blog (TechChunks.com), the suggested posts were always spot-on; so spot on that we decided to remove the earlier “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” altogether.

On the flip side, it would be great if you could actually customize how the related items are displayed on your blog. And it would also be great if it gave the user some idea on the algorithm that they use to decide a set of related posts to display.

But that doesn’t take away any credit from this super-cool plugin and if you are looking for a different way to showcase more of your blog posts on your blog, LinkWithin is definitely worth a try.

How to setup LinkWithin:
Thankfully, the LinkWithin plugin is very easy to use and install. To do so, just visit linkwithin home page, enter your blog URL, select platform, download and install the plugin. That’s it

What are you waiting for then? Give it a try and see if it helps you to reduce bounce rate of your blog. If you have already tried LinkWithin, let us hear how it helped/not helped you in reducing bounce rate.