Most HTML websites offer information to visitors but don’t provide an easy way for visitors to interact with the website. This is one of the advantages of using WordPress–it’s easy to give your visitors ways to engage and interact with your website.

Sharing Their Thoughts

By enabling comments on your WordPress website or blog you give visitors a way to share their thoughts with you. You can choose to moderate your comments if you’re concerned about what may be posted. Enabling Akismet or using Disqus are also good ways to combat spam. You can also allow visitors to comment on some pages but not others, or only on your blog posts.

Sharing Your Content

Allow visitors to share your content with their friends, colleagues and social networks by enabling one of the many social networking plugins:

ShareThis

Sociable

Add to Any

Sexy Bookmarks

fbLikeButton

TweetMeMe Retweet Button

and others
These options will make it easier for your visitors to share your content and make it more likely that they will.

Showing Their Support

As you build a community around your blog, you’ll want to allow new visitors to see the community. Active commenters on your blog is part of showing that community. Here are some other great options:

MyBlogLog: A service from yahoo that shows the latest visitors to your blog in a colorful widget.

NetworkedBlogs: This site can do more than just connect your blog to your Facebook fan page. You can also create a widget that shows who’s following your blog.

Facebook Fan Box: Add a fan box to your website to show your latest status updates as well as the avatars of your page’s fans.

Google Friend Connect: Allows you to add additional social features to your blog including rating, sharing, and comments.
Sharing Their Own Content

Give your visitors a way to share their content and promote themselves to keep them coming back. You can do this by enabling plugins like CommentLuv or Top Commentators that give them links back to their own site when they comment. You can also offer options like link directories, member directories, and other opportunities for them to share their websites or businesses.

Staying Up-to-Date

Another way to encourage visitors to return to your blog and continue reading, commenting, and sharing your content is to offer them subscription options. WordPress has an RSS (real simple syndication) feed built in that you can offer for visitors who use an RSS reader. Use FeedBlitz or FeedBurner to allow them to choose to subscribe by email.