Sorry folks who do not have blogs. This is a blog SEO tip. If you don’t have a blog I strongly recommend it though. It adds life to your site and adds more pages to ‘catch’ more keywords on the search engines. Furthermore the active content drives the search bots wild. Fresh content from blogs can rejuvenate old post and pages on your site that have gotten stale, inactive or completely forgotten.
Every blog post has its own page and every page has its own source code. If you check the source code of any given post, you’ll notice that comments on your posts count as content toward your site too. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on the types and amount of comments your blog gets. If your site is quality and worthy then people will leave comments containing content.
With so many blogs ranking on the SERP’s how can Google tell which blogs actually fulfills the point of a blog (interaction with users) and which ones will actually deliver a pleasant user experience(or at least content that keeps them coming back)? Which sites get routine posts and routine comments? Since we must consider the fact that commentators share content, it’s fair to assume getting lots of comments matching your posts can help increase your rankings due to extra relevant content backing the topic you are posting about.
Now how can I make sure my posts’ comments are comments that will help my site?
- Context of Comments: Are the comments describing what you are talking about? Are there any comments containing variations of your title or the keywords you are targeting?
- Length of Comments: If the comments are relating to the post, then the more sentences of content, the merrier. If someone wants to post a comment that’s the length of your post, cool. If 20 commentators leave 2 paragraph comments relating to your content, then your blog is doing great. It looks good to visitors for them to see interaction and you have a better chance of picking up more keyword real estate on the SERP’s.
- Amount of Comments/Links: The amount of comments should NOT be limited. BUT, the amount of links should be, because having a hundred or more links on your pages could trigger link farm flags. So the amount of commentators posting a link SHOULD BE LIMITED. It’s just safe to set your option to close at 100 comments. Sometimes a commentator creates a link and some don’t. But also take into account how many other external links you already have on your blogrolls and within that post. Then decide your comment max.
How many comments are there per post? How consistent are your comments? Does your blog consistently get 10 or more comments per post no matter what you write about? These are trust triggering questions, no?
Comments are also good because they refresh your page with new content. A lively page is a good page. Just look at the definition of “relevance”; Pertinence to the matter at hand.