Bounce rates refer to the percentage of visitors exiting your website as soon as they land on one of the site's pages. For example, if 1000 people visit your site in one day and 500 immediately "bounce" off the site because it wasn't what they wanted or expected, then your website has a bounce rate of 50 percent.

Unfortunately, that's considered a high bounce rate and indicates something is seriously wrong with the way your site presents its appearance, content, interface or a combination of all three to visitors. PC World says websites shouldn't experience bounce rates any higher than 30 percent. If you find your website is acting like a trampoline when users visit it, consider the following tips to help decrease your website's "bounceability" and give you a better inbound marketing ROI.

7 Ways to Improve Bounce Rates

1. A powerful inbound marketing campaign.

that reduces bounce times requires an outstanding landing page that, according to Hubspot, demands answers to four questions: what is being offered, how would a user benefit from the offer, why does the user need the offer and how can the user get the offer?

2. Decreasing website load time. 

Nearly all Internet users today have high-speed connections that allows them to click on a website and see it within one or two seconds. If it takes any longer for your site to load, you're likely to lose that visitor to a faster site. To expedite website loading times, avoid placing large images on your site, use a web host that has same-country servers and find a good content delivery network so that you can store bigger files, JS, CSS files and videos.

3. A website with responsive design.

With tablet and mobile traffic representing nearly 40 percent of all web traffic, developing a website with responsive design capabilities enhances user experience by adjusting components of the site to adapt to mobile and tablet screens. Higher than average bounce rates may be the consequence of ignoring the influence of mobile traffic.

4. Well-structured content.

Website content shouldn't look like the Great Wall of China, i.e., an imposing and unreadable wall of text with no breaks or white space. Blocks of text are unnerving and won't contribute to your inbound marketing campaign, either. Tear down that wall with paragraphs containing no more than four sentences and separate text with plenty of white space or uncomplicated visual content (clipart, gifs, video).

5. Proper link opening protocol.

Make sure any external links embedded in your site's content opens in a new window. Nothing is more irritating to users (and more conducive to increasing bounce rates) than to click on an external link and having it open in the same window. It's confusing and causes the user to forget about your site once they start viewing another site.

6. Usage of Google Analytics.

Use Google Analytics to find and fix those unproductive pages that are performing poorly and contributing to high bounce rates.

7. Appropriate calls to action.

Finally, a successful inbound marketing campaign that includes a powerful call-to-action will also help slash those bounce rates by grabbing and keeping the user's attention. Examples of persuasive phrases incorporated in a compelling call-to-action include: "receive a free..."; "money back guarantee"; "no committment"; "order now and receive a free gift"; and, of course, the call-to-action that nobody can resist--"don't click this link!". Creating a sense of urgency in a call-to-action along with placing it in a highly visible section of your website will also improve your inbound marketing ROI.