Hello,

I'm a little concerned by the rate of hits that I am getting that are leaving my homepage without going to any of my other pages. Obviously you are always going to get some.
I've read by one source the industry average is between 25% and 50% another source says less. That seems to be a very wide range.
In your opinion what would be a reasonable Bounce Rate from your homepage.
My target is 25% but I'm getting a considerably higher rate.

I don't know, but this brings up another question - how are people getting to your home page? If by search, I would expect them to start off on some internal page?

What's on your home page?

"Industry average" depends on the industry itself. I usually find it's around the 30-40% range, depending on the site.

This isn't a stat I pay a great deal of attention to by itself, though. My most important stats are conversions, sales, profits.

Well I'll start to look at conversions once I start to get a reasonable amount of people on my site.
At the moment I don't seem to be able to get that.
I don't seem to be able to get very many visitors to my site from Search Engines, Google seems to be increasing a little.
But Yahoo, I paid their extortionate US$299 listing and in the past month I've had 2 visits. I get a handful of visitors from Web Directories, the majority come from links I've left on forums which go to my homepage.
DMOZ I'm still waiting to hear from 2 months later - I'm not holding my breath.
My homepage is an intro, a couple pictures and navigation.
The way I see it is when you have minimal visitors I'd like to maximise their exposure to my site.
I suspect patience is the key , I just want to do everything in my power to get what's in my control right
I just see that if you're losing 50% of visitors at the homepage that's 50% that aren't going to buy anything or even return to the site.

No surprise on the Yahoo! directory thing. It's become increasingly less useful (as have directories in a general sense.)

Dumbass...no, wait, that's DMOZ...they can take years to review and index a site. They do have a few good editors that understand what a quality site is and what a spam site is, but they're getting drowned out by the spammers and idiots with a vested interest.

Agreed with the maximizing of the exposure, but if you have minimal visitors, you probably don't have enough to measure yet. You also may be tracking crawlers and things of that nature as part of your "visitors".

Patience is the key, with a secondary key being the understanding that you'll have to tweak as you go along because no one ever gets their site right the first time (but you seem to have that too.)