I’ve just recently read a well put together article by a chap called Scot Robinson, about how to reduce your Bounce Rates in 8 steps. These steps are:

1. Include Clear Call-to-Actions
2. Make Sure the Content of Your Articles and Posts Meet Visitor Expectations
3. Include Well Designed Navigation with Targeted Options
4. Less is More
5. A Picture Tells a Thousand Words
6. Fix Your Crappy Design
7. The Site Loads Too Slow
8. Test, Test and Test Some More

However…
When you actually read the article through, I summarised it more as:

1. Include Clear Call-to-Actions – GOOD WEBSITE DESIGN
2. Make Sure the Content of Your Articles and Posts Meet Visitor Expectations – RELEVANT CONTENT
3. Include Well Designed Navigation with Targeted Options – GOOD WEBSITE DESIGN
4. Less is More – GOOD WEBSITE DESIGN
5. A Picture Tells a Thousand Words – GOOD WEBSITE DESIGN
6. Fix Your Crappy Design – GOOD WEBSITE DESIGN
7. The Site Loads Too Slow – GOOD HARDWARE / INFRASTRUCTURE
8. Test, Test and Test Some More – OPTIMISE

This is a helpful article and does go into some important aspects you may have overlooked, but in terms of general pointers; a strong call to action, a well structured site with good, clear design, hand-holding the visitor along, really should be common sense to anyone wishing to succeed online. Of course, you need good load times, anything whatsoever that is likely to frustrate, annoy, delay, distract or otherwise tempt the visitor from their intended action is going to harm your end result analytics and this may mean bounce rate. But isn’t this just general good usability?

The moral of the story? If you want low bounce rates, make sure you have a well designed website that works well and doesn’t annoy people, giving them a clear call to action. If you want to monitor and improve things, then monitor & test them. Common sense? Simple Common Sense, as Mike might say.