First, let’s be sure we know what we are talking about.What is BOUNCE RATE? Bounce rate is a single page visit, either to your website or your blog, where a visitor arrives, looks at who or what you are, and leaves. Hence the term “bounce”. That is given as a percentage for your website or your blog:
Bounce Rate% = (Number of visitors who do not visit any other page / Total number of visitors) x 100
So the greater your bounce rate number, the less chance there is that your visitors are being influenced in any way by your content (that would be a hint for one of the ways to reduce your bounce rate, by the way!). Why does it matter to your website? Simply put, bounce rate measures the quality of your website from your visitors and readers’ point-of-view. The more compelling your pages, the longer visitors will stay on your site and the more it will CONVERT.
Thus, if you wish your website to be effective, it’s extremely important to reduce your bounce rate as much as possible.
How To calculate bounce rate of your blog / website ?
The best and free method is to use google analytic service.Sign up and submit your blog.If you are using wordpress,then you can use many available google analytic wordpress plugins.
What does Bounce Rate mean?
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
Why is my Bounce Rate so high?
A lot of you may ask this question after going through your analytic data.
A high bounce rate is most likely due to an incorrect implementation of the tracking code. People may also leave your site from your entrance page because of site design and usability issues.
Correctly tagging your pages
A bounce is defined as a single-page visit. If you only have one page on your site, it’s expected that you’ll have a high bounce rate because it will not register multiple pageviews unless visitors refresh your site from within their browser. Another consideration is blog sites – you’ll see high bounce rates here as well, since mostly all of the content on the site will be available on the homepage.
If you’re seeing a high bounce rate even though your site isn’t a blog and has more than one page, check to see that you’ve tagged all your pages with the tracking code. If you’ve only tagged your homepage, your Google Analytics account will be unable to identify any other pageviews from your site. You can use the Google Analytics Site Scan tool to verify that all pages on your site include the tracking code.
Site design
If your site itself is the problem, focus your efforts on redesigning entrance (or landing) pages or optimizing your landing pages with any ads they may correspond to. Learn how to experiment with site-wide changes to optimize your site with Website Optimizer.
Usability issues
Other factors may be solely attributed to the visitor’s behavior. For example, if a user bookmarks a page on your site, visits it, and leaves, then that’s considered a pageview – or bounce.
So,what should be a limit to bounce rate for a site to be normal? What’s considered a good or bad bounce rate?
Someone asked -
Our new website has a bounce rate of 41% percent. We’re in financial services. Is that good or bad? Can anyone please give me an indication of what’s acceptable or what we should be aiming for? At first sight it sounds high, but from a quick search I infer anything above 50% is not so good, 30 to 40% is okay.
As you can see,its a service providing website,and their bounce rate is usually lower than blogs or forums which only provide information.As long as you have optimized the site well it doesn’t really matter what industry you are in. To clarify, there is nothing that says if you are financial services your bounce rate should be between 30%-40%. A well optimized site will be getting a majority of visitors that are actually looking for the information or services you have to offer up and therefore have a lower bounce rate. That being said your quick search is pretty spot on, anything 50% or above is not good. Either you are having people sent to the wrong landing page or the content on the page is not organized well enough to convey your message effectively. 30% to 40% is not bad but definitely not ideal. Optimization is not a quick and easy process but it sounds like you are taking some steps in the right direction. Hope this of some use to you.
Bounce rates depends on the traffic sources the page stickiness w.r.t to users. Also if your site has textual info with cluttered lay out then it might increase bounce rates. Direct and SEO source has the lowest bounce rate while Adwords SEM has the highest bounce rate even if your landing pages are well designed. Referral source bounce rates can be high to higher (depending on relevancy of partner sites)
Ideally bounce rates for SEO should not be more than 20% to 25% (provided you are targeting relevant core keywords)
Anything that goes beyond 35% is not good and alarming signal TO RECONSIDER usability factors in the site. So if you increase your Adwords budget for a particular month then bounce rates of the site for that month would increase.
There are some specific plugins for wordpress that will help you to deal with the bounce rate on your blogs.
Last,but not least if you are really serious to know about the bounce rate and how to lower it,watch this video from Google itself.
Keep on blogging ! 
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