Social media, on-line communities and blogs are all great ways to engage visitors and to increase traffic and, therefore, potential customers to your website. But a new study has found that many companies have still not cottoned on to this potential business advantage.

The Engaged Web Study by Episerver looked at 10 companies from various industries and then scored the on a range of engagement criteria.

Here are some of the findings:

•    Just 34% of the companies studied featured a community on their site.
•    Only 44% of companies with a community actually initiated a conversation with visitors (although more did respond to queries).
•    While 40% of the sites had a blog few updated these often enough.
•    Only 34% of the blogs studied were updated on a regular basis
•    Just 19% of brands advertise the blog across the rest of their website.
•    Only 19% of the sites display a link on their home page to their Facebook.
•    Just 15% advertise their Twitter presence
•    34% of sites provide links that allow a visitor to “share” content on a social network, but only 16% allow the visitor to rate and tag content.

In a competitive marketplace, few companies will want to miss a trick. Why not speak to WebCreationUK about updating your site to include a community feature, blog and sharing icons?

A new report has revealed that almost three-quarters (73%) of on-line women are now active social media users. The study by BlogHer and iVillage shows that on average women are engaging weekly or more often with popular social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter.

The American survey also found that women increasingly look at blogs and message boards when seeking advice and recommendations. So it seems that even as the use of social media sites such as Facebook continue to grow, women are still looking to blogs as a reliable resource.

This study underlines the importance of blogs for businesses, and especially for e-commerce companies that might want to target the female buyer market.

Other highlights from the study include:
:

*Among the iVillage community, 73% say they share topics on message boards/forums that they would not share on social networks.

* Of those, relationships (61%), health (45%) and work-related (39%) issues were the main topics they would not share on social networks.

A website that sells ordinary household products has shown how blogging can be good for business. Alice.com launched in June and by July had doubled its traffic to 387,000 unique visitors – and apparently most of this traffic came from word-of-mouth blogs.

While other social media networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, no doubt also contributed, it was blogger.com that was found to be the biggest traffic driver. Blogger accounted for 18% of Alice.com’s referral traffic in July, and that’s before other blogging sites were taken into account.

Of course, to get valuable blog traffic you need to give bloggers something to talk about, and obviously Alice.com – an American site that sells items such as toothpaste, nappies and washing powder straight from the manufacturers – has something that many people find worth talking about.

However, it’s worth remembering that Alice.com will need to keep consumers happy. It would be just as easy for the site to become unpopular if dissatisfied consumers started blogging negative reactions.

Still, this site does go to show the power of blogging as an e-commerce business driver.

Blogging is big – but good blogging is not as easy at it might seem. And if you do not write a good blog then no-one is going to bother to come back to read more. So, in the end, one badly-written blog can be the end of the start of your blogging career.

And, remember, that a good blog with a strong following can also be the basis of a great business website.

Here are the top tips for writing the perfect blog.

Keep it relevant: If you’re writing a fitness blog, or a fashion blog, or a design blog, keep your postings relevant. The type of people that follow your blog will want to read about your topic area, and not about your latest domestic fiasco or the colour of your new car. (Unless, of course, you are writing a blog about domestic fiascos or car colours!)

The title: A title is like a label on your blog posting and the more specific and interesting it is the more people will want to read it. Think about how the title will look as a standalone item on an RSS feed.

For starters: Give the first line or two some impact. The more engaging the first line is, the more chance you have of people reading on.

What’s the point?: Make sure there is a point to your posting, rather than allowing the post to become a general ramble. It’s best to have a start, a middle and a finish to all postings.

Make it happen: Encourage readers to interact with your blog by posting a comment.   The more dedicated blog followers you have the better.

Quality control: Just like when you were at school, always read over what you have written and check for punctuation, spelling and grammar mistakes. Many readers are put off by a poorly written posting, even if it is an informal blog.

Keep on talking: If someone comments on your blog then take the time to talk back. Dialogue is the key to a good blog following.

Keep on blogging: Many bloggers start well but then they quickly run out of steam and only blog every once in a while. A good blogger will keep their site regularly updated with relevant and interesting postings. While this does take time it is worth the effort in terms of blogging disciples.

A new study reports that women keep their personal and business lives separate when it comes to social media. According to the 2009 Women in Social Media Study, while women see blogs as a good source of info about products and purchases, most (75%) use social networks solely for keeping in touch with family and friends.

The survey also revealed that a third of women who use social networks are loyal to just one, for example Facebook or Twitter.

In another revelation, it appears that following a purchase women bloggers are twice as likely to share a positive purchase experience on blogs and message boards and about 40% more likely to share a negative experience.

So Google Blog Search has changed the way it indexes content.

Instead of  indexing content from RSS feeds, the search now focuses on full content from pages.

According to those in the know at Google the indexing change has “improved the results for a lot of queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because we extract links that are missing from the feeds”.

But change rarely comes without a niggle or two. Some users have reported problems in a Google Groups post when a person’s blog name drew results based on blogroll content, too.

The Google team member does admit that “there have been occasional complaints about the use of the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds”.

Google also revealed that it had expected some problems from blogroll matches, but that they “may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name”.

However, Google is working on fixing this glitch and plans to use the full-page content for searches, but exclude the content that isn’t actually part of the post.

The search engine supremo is hoping to have the problem sorted by the end of this year.