How people surf the Internet and read your posts

Jakob Nielsen is the guru of the Internet website usability. Jakob’s research helps us learn how visitors surf the Internet and read your blog posts and pages. This way bloggers can learn what to do to improve the blog usability and blog stickiness to increase the blog readership and earnings.

First we will take a look at how users spend their time online. You must consider this when writing your blog posts. Internet is a user-driven medium where users feel that they have to move on and click on things. Users are engaged and want to go places and get things done. People want to feel that they are active when they are on the web.

Modern life is hectic and people simply don’t have time to work too hard for their information. Google has made Internet search so easy which means that the easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual blog or website.

Each blog has to compete with millions of other blogs and websites for the user’s attention. Users don’t know whether particular blog is the one they need or whether some other blog or site would be better so they are not willing to commit the investment of reading the blog page in the hope that it will be good. Instead of spending a lot of time on a single blog page, users move between many pages and try to pick the most tasty segments of each.

These factors contribute to the fact that when on a particular blog or website, people rarely read blog posts and web pages word by word. Instead, they scan the blog post or the web page, picking out individual words and sentences. 79 percent of Jakob Nielsen’s test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. This is a very important fact for any blogger.