Web Visitor engagement - the equity of future web logs

Posted: May 2007 C: Internet Posted by: K. Panayotakis

Visitor engagement is a major aim in the blogosphere and a major discussion topic. In order to develop repeat visits to a blog, one has to achieve visitor engagement. This is quite difficult in the rapidly growing web which offers many choices. The exit rate from sites is commonly high and visitors spend few minutes on a page only if they find interesting information.

The visitor experience determines the degree of engagement developed.

Content found on a web site is relevant when: • It provides useful relevant info which can hardly be found on other competing sites • Links on web pages are leading to highly relevant content which builds on the already viewed info • Landing pages on sponsored links prove to be relevant to what they claim to offer. • SEO and keyword use is practised with caution.

On the other hand, content relevance may not be enough to achieve a high degree of visitor engagement. Other factors influence visitor behavior as well: • reputation of the author / blog • feedback in the form of comments, enriching the web page analysis • social media voting process • other blogs votes (links to a given blog) • google pagerank, influence the visitor perception and evaluation mechanism.

However, the Web offers a unique opportunity to attract interest without having built a reputation in advance, independently of conventional reviewers and publishers. The community is able to collectively evaluate a blog.