How do I best manage my bounce rate?

Managing your bounce rate should be a component of your overall SEO strategy b/c a high bounce rate means that the people coming to your site are not getting your message, or are the wrong people (if you are still confused as to what a bounce rate is please refer to the previous blog post).

A bounce rate is a tricky thing, and although you should always strive to have a bounce rate approaching 0%, this is not possible.

The most important thing to understand about the bounce rate/traffic relationship is, if you have one million visitors to your site, and a bounce rate of 100%, you essentially have had 0 visitors. (In fact, those unscrupulous sites that promise you “1 million hits to your site in a week” might get you that million hits, but they’ll also get you a bounce rate of 99.9%).
Another important thing about bounce rate is that it may be both seasonal and industry specific. Seasonal because a flower distributor will likely have a significantly lower bounce rate close to Valentines Day, and a college textbook store will likely have a lower bounce rate at the start of each semester; and industry specific because different types of websites are likely to see different patterns in their bounce rate.

A good example of the importance/or unimportance of bounce rate is that of Google. I am not aware of Google’s exact bounce rate, but I would be willing to bet that it is very high, because many people have Google as their homepage, and when they open their browser window, Google always comes up and they typically navigate away from that page without doing anything; but given the amount of traffic that Google receives a high bounce rate may be seen as insignificant.
Another way to look at bounce rate is like this, is it better to have 1000 hits to your site with an average bounce rate of 90%, or to have 200 hits to your site with an average bounce rate of 40%? (Of course the answer is the 2nd scenario, b/c in that case you will have 120 quality visitors to your site; where as in the 1st example you’d only have 100 such visitors)
source: http://netlz1.wordpress.com/