LinkSensor is the newly launched service by Dmitri Soubbotin (the creator od SenseBot reviewed on SEJ in the past). Basically, the tool is meant to make your content more “scannable” by analyzing your page and highlighting the major points.
LinkSensor semantically analyzes your posts or articles on-the-fly and highlights key concepts in the text.
The benefit for webmasters using the tool are pretty clear:
- Lower bounce rate and increased user engagement (LinkSensor automatically picks up key concepts from the post and highlights them with a double underline – relevant highlights catch the visitor’s attention);
- Better internal site click-through rate and increased pageviews (when you hover over the highlighted words, the tool displays a balloon with a few more relevant articles from the same website. The balloon can display up to 4 tabs populated with links from different venues).
- More visits to your other blogs (if you have more than one blog or site, you can redirect the users from one to another, all within the context of your post).
I haven’t tried the tool on my own site but my main concern is that these highlights look very much like contextual in-text ads people often see from site to site – so instead of appearing more attracting and encouraging to stay, the page may actually seem too ad-stuffed. I believe that would be great to have the option that would allow the user to customize the highlighted text look and feel.
Note: I’ve had a chat with the developer and according to him,
…the actual LinkSensor product allows configurations like the number of unique concepts to highlight (the default is 3); the number of how many times to highlight one concept in the text (the default is every time it is mentioned, but it could be from 1 and up). The colors and styles are not flexible yet but will be eventually; for now can be adjusted manually by us. The number of tabs and their content is of course an individual setting too.
To test the tool you are welcome to download the FireFox addon here (bottom of the page). The tool recognizes major blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, etc.). After you install it, navigate to any blog, click “Tools” in your Firefox menus and choose “LinkSensor”. Then you should be able to see text snippets underlined on the blog page:
(what I like about the tool is that there was no link to the LinkSensor site in the balloon)
For the production version (which is available to those who contact the creator directly), the webmaster will need to copy a couple of lines of Javascript into the post page template (similar to Google Analytics script). When a post page is opened by the reader, the service activates on the fly, semantically parses the content of the post and highlights key concepts.
P.S. I was very much amused to see my post screenshot on the official tool page showcasing the tool in action.
Like I said above, I haven’t tried the production version yet but decided to share the new tool with you nevertheless (under SEJ tool review disclosure). I would love to hear your thoughts! Would you give it a try?
