Dmitri Soubbotin is the CEO of Semantic Engines LLC, the maker of the search engine SenseBot.

Thousands of new blogs get created every day. While most of them are directed towards a close circle of friends or colleagues, others have a greater ambition of speaking to large audiences. It is only natural that when such a blog grows in popularity, it is often turning into a business. The costs of producing content and maintaining the infrastructure grow, and the number of visitors makes it a realistic venue for advertising. The content gets ready to be monetized.

In this case, the blogger starts thinking in terms of the number of page views and unique visitors. With the notable exception of AdSense, many ad networks require a blog to cross a certain threshold of page views per month in order to qualify for advertising.

What are the best ways to get more visitors and increase the page views? You want to produce more high-quality content and expose it to the readers. But if you are a prolific writer and publish a lot, you face the fact that even loyal visitors will be missing some of your posts. The information overload and the readers’ short attention span make it a challenge to keep your audience up to speed with your content.

A frequently used method of addressing this issue is a “Related posts” tool or plug-in that generates a list of “possibly related posts”. But even when the accuracy of such a tool is satisfactory, the list that is located next to the article can be easily overlooked by the reader.

A different approach is based on the in-text content discovery. It involves semantic analysis of the text, identifying key concepts in the post and suggesting more posts relevant to the same concept. The beauty of the approach is that the user navigates straight from the context of the post. The suggestions are made at the moment when the user lends his attention to the content and therefore is likely to perceive suggested relevant links as a value-adding feature.

LinkSensor is a tool of this kind distributed by Semantic Engines. LinkSensor semantically analyzes your posts on-the-fly and highlights key concepts in the text. When the user’s mouse is over a highlighted word, a small balloon shows up suggesting other articles from your blog related to the word.

For example, look at this screenshot of LinkSensor on an AltSearchEngines post. The concepts identified are: “WhatIfSearch”, “absinthe”, “hallucinate”. The mouse hovered over “absinthe”, and a balloon popped up suggesting a few other related posts on the topic from AltSearchEngines.com.

By navigating to other relevant posts, the user will discover more pages and spend more time on your site on average. This may directly result in higher ad revenue, or make your blog eligible to attract bigger advertisers. If you have several blogs or sites, you can use LinkSensor to redirect the users from one to another, all from the context of your posts! Rather than losing a visitor after he reads through your post, you have a chance to navigate him to your other venue – perhaps with a higher eCPM.

LinkSensor supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType and other blogging platforms, and can usually quickly configure support for another platform. You can download a trial version in the form of a Firefox extension. More information and the download is available at www.LinkSensor.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 4:26 pm and is filed under CEO Views, Guest Authors, Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.