Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	March 21, 2008

Sites like Menshealth.com and BHG.com are significantly increasing pages per visit by adopting an improved user-friendly online editorial layout

Reader engagement is a key metric important to all publishers. Time spent, pages per visit and return visits are all numbers that every online publisher should hold near and dear.

Menshealth.com has seen an astounding 78.3% increase in pages per visit from last year by adopting article navigation that users are finding friendlier, not to mention the added benefit of increased page views.

While online publishers use mostly below the fold story navigation to break up content into various pages and increase page views:

| page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | page 4 |

or

< Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >

Menshealth.com has started putting story navigation above the fold, in a table of contents type of style, (see below).

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BHG.com has also seen an increase in pages per visit over last year.

Their strategy seems to be in using slideshows to help navigate users to full-length articles and more related content.

It’s important to know whom to follow online, so be sure to check out your competitors’ data by using Compete.com and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Compete.com will provide you with any website’s unique visitor counts, visits per month, average time spent monthly and average pages per visit monthly (among lots of other cool things!). Yahoo! Site Explorer will help you size how large an online publisher is in terms of amount of content (number of webpages) and amount of inbound links (how many other sites are linking to them), which are two metrics that help indicate overall online publishing success.