tedster - 9:37 pm on Aug 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

Bounce rate on its own is a very fuzzy metric. Google spokespeople have often mentioned that it is too "noisy" to use as a direct signal.

I'd suggest you need first to adjust your bounce rate to remove those pages where people spend significant time o the page (dwell time) but don't click through to another page on your site. Those visitors are not really problematic.

If you use Google Analytics, there's a recent article that describes how to do this automatically - see See Tracking Adjusted Bounce Rate In Google Analytics [analytics.blogspot.com]

Looking for a hard number as a "good" bounce rate can also be frustrating, because that will vary by website. What I do is focus on improving the adjusted bounce rate in comparison to earlier bounce rates on the same page.website.