Blog Comments| Content Value and SEO Benefits

Blog comments, why are they important? And why did I decide to talk about their value today?

I receive hundreds of blog comments on each and every blog post I write. Of course many comments are just a plain spam generated by comment bots.

Yet some blog comments are left by real people. Unfortunately, they don’t know how to write a comment that would bring blog the value of unique additional content.

Every blog owner is glad to read comments such as “interesting post” or “I like it” or “thank you”. But such comments are not really interesting to other people who visit the blog. And, as you may notice, only a few of those comments are actually published on this blog.

If you’re one of real people who left a comment that is not published, don’t get upset. I would love to post your comment if it’s done right.

So let’s discuss the right and wrong way to write a comment, and why it’s beneficial for a blog visitor to spend a few extra minutes to write a content-rich comment.

Why would you want to write a blog comment, and why spammers spend thousands of dollars on different blog spamming scripts?

There are three main reasons:

1) Quick Site Indexing and Link Discovery
2) High Quality Targeted Web Traffic
3) Potential Benefit of a One-Way Link from the Authority Blog.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

Quick Site Indexing and Link Discovery. If your comment is published on a blog which is frequently visited by search engine spiders, the link to your site (which you put in the “comment author” field,) is spidered too.

This means, search engines will visit your site or blog, and, if they like what they see there, index it. So comment posting is a good way to let search engines discover and index your site, especially if your site is new.

High Quality Targeted Web Traffic. When your blog comment is posted, people who visit the blog can read it, and click on your link. If you post comments on blogs that have some relevancy to your own (for example, they are in the same niche market), then you can get high quality targeted traffic this way. Those people are already pre-qualified prospects for your products and services.

Potential Benefit of a One-Way Link from the Authority Blog. The one-way link is “potential” because many blog owners use “nofollow” attribute while publishing your comment. Nofollow allows blog owners to publish links on their blogs without bleeding Page Rank. In this case you don’t get a PR benefit from the blog (though you still get indexing and traffic benefits described in 2 previous paragraphs.)

But many blog owners don’t use “nofollow” tag. In fact, many even don’t know what that is. So when writing a comment, you have a chance to receive a one-way link from the authority blog with high PR. This can substantially increase the PR of your own site or blog.

Here is how PR flow may look like:

That’s in a nutshell, why spam bots post tons of comments on millions of blogs. They want this link juice. Of course, if you have an anti-spam plugin installed, such as Akismet, it catches the majority of spam comments. So they are useless. But hey, not everyone has anti-spam tools on their blogs.

For actual blog visitors there is another reason to write meaningful blog comments (this one doesn’t apply to blog bots).

You can build a relationship with a blog owner.

Sure, you can build relationship through social networks. But this is just another way to get noticed. If you post comments that bring real value to the blog, not only your comments be published, the blog owner will be more inclined to hear what you have to say.

How to write valuable blog comments?

Read the post first, think what you can add on the same topic. What information is not covered in the post, but yet is highly relevant and useful?

To better understand what I’m talking about, here is the example of such blog comment.
Look at the comment left by a lady Lama Kalla.

She took time to briefly describe some of the techniques that should be used to build a relationship with followers. I use those techniques, but I didn’t mention them in the post she commented on, so this comment has a clear content value, and is beneficial to the readers of my blog.

Bottom line, good blog comments are beneficial for both parties. They bring additional content value to the blog owner and give SEO juice to blog comment writers.

Now you know how to do this right. Good Luck!

Here are a few more useful posts on blog comments:

Spam Comments Could Threaten Your Blog’s Search Engine Ranking … – Spam is the bane of just about every blog owner on the planet, and it gets to be overwhelming at times and you just end up throwing your hands up in the air and saying “to heck with it, let it go through!” Well, Google thinks that’s a …

How to put blog comments to good use | Penelope Trunk’s Brazen … – I don’t usually write about my life in real time, because the difference between a blog post than reads like a diary entry and a blog post that someone would.

Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: The comments policy here – I do have one, and it’s worked quite well, so much so that I am able to approve 90% or more of submitted comments (spam excluded!). But for those newer to the blog, you might take a look at it….

CommentLuv – Reward Commenters On Your Blog With Blog Links – That means that if you visit my blog and comment on one of my posts, you’ll have the option to have a link to one of YOUR latest posts right there, in the comment section of MY blog! The WordPress comments plugin takes the website …

Tagged as: blog comment, blog comments, Methods of website linking, Nofollow, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization