Well, that really isn’t the case.  Before you go and get too worried about your bounce rates, don’t worry too much.  In fact, as has been said before on the web and as I’m mirroring here – High Bounce Rates Are Not Always Bad. In fact, on some sites…they’re a good thing.

If your site is a blog or information providing site such as Wikipedia, with lovely SEO and lots of nice direct SERP links to topical pages, then you will have high bounce rates and that will be good!  It will mean people are landing exactly where they want to be, fulfilling their need and then leaving.  People searching for information about a topic, store opening times, where to find you, prices, or any other action that can be fulfilled all from one page will be happily getting this and then leaving. Clocking up a bounce for you.  But it’s ok!

If you’re a retailer and trying to lure then into the site with promises of discounts and gold however, then it’s probably not so good.  Stronger call to actions needed and yada yada yada…But just remember, please -

High Bounce Rates Are Not Always Bad – Sometimes They Are Good!

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.