This is something that I can’t believe I haven’t heard other people talk about yet, but it’s so simple and easy to implement!
When you’re surfing the net, catching up on the news, reading your favourite blogs, etc – if they have a comment section, take an extra 2 minutes and comment on what you just read, linking back to your site.
So many people finish reading the blog post and just move on that it baffles me!
Leaving a comment does three things:
- You get a link back to your site
- You build your network
- You make the writer feel more motivated to write.
It doesn’t get better than that.
You Get A Link Back To Your Site
If you’re like most people, you are already spending time and money building links to your site. Commenting on blogs in this way is an excellent way to give a bit of a boost with natural looking links. Of course the reason they look natural is because they are natural.
Sometimes we get so lost in checking for a high PageRank and dofollow that we lose sight of normality. Don’t worry if the blog post is a PageRank zero or whether the link to your site would be nofollowed. Don’t worry about putting keywords in the Name area. Don’t worry about putting your url in the comment section. Just be like a regular person:
- Enter your real name (or nom de plume if applicable),
- Real email address (I use a free yahoo one for all my social media posting to keep spam out of my “proper” email accounts),
- And website – you can put a particular page in the website section, as opposed to your homepage, but I generally can’t be bothered going to get the exact link – it’s meant to be as quick and painless as possible.
Your comment should add something to the conversation. Say what you liked or didn’t like about the content of the blog post. I try to think what would I say if a friend handed me an article and I read it in front of them – you’d be expected to say something about the article when you handed it back to them, wouldn’t you?
Don’t worry about whether the comment links are nofollowed (if you don’t know what that means, read my post on the Death of Nofollow). I’ve seen for myself in the last few months that Google doesn’t fully listen when someone says a link is nofollowed.
If you don’t have a website, link to a favoured charity and help them out.
You Build Your Network
By commenting on blogs, people see you about and get to know you. If the blog has comment moderation, you can guarantee the owner (or an assistant) sees your name every time you comment. I go to pretty much every site to check the person out before accepting a comment on any of my blogs. Who knows, you might even be invited to do a guest post on that person’s blog, or they may give you free promotion, simply because they like your stuff.
In this web 2.0 world, everything is about connections, networking, talking to people, etc. Don’t get left behind.
You Make The Writer Feel More Motivated To Write
Most people spend a lot of time on their blog posts. It takes time to research and write them and almost as long to edit it and come up with a good header :)
Most blogs that fail do so because the writer isn’t motivated to write any more. The main reason for this is:
- They don’t feel like anyone is listening, so why should they keep writing?
- It’s not financially worth their time.
By leaving a simple comment on their site, you can almost single-handedly take out the first reason! The second one is for them, not you, to worry about (just thought I’d make that clear lol).
So what are you waiting for? Go comment on the articles you read. You can start by commenting on this post :D Thanks for reading!
Thanks for the tip – I spend alot of time online reading, now I can justify that time.
ps – hope you enjoy our site
Hi Mike,
I will follow your tip and start by adding my link here ;o)
Best regards,
Ian
That’s what I like to see – people taking the initiative. Cheers guys :)
What a great article!! I will spread the word….
Thanks Mike, I had read in other articles that if you post comments, and if it is no-follow link, then Google robots, never follow the link, now after reading your article I will go to my niche and make a habit of commenting to those article that I feels helps me.
I think that even if Google doesn’t follow the links, sites such as Alexa.com still show them. Plus, someone may like the comment you posted and click the link to your site, driving traffic there and so on.
Getting comments on blogs is really harder these days because so many people use Facebook and seem to prefer to say something there, rather than on the blog post. itself. Is it a good idea to ask them, in the post, to leave a comment?
You can add facebook comments to your pages. It’s better to encourage interaction with your brand than forcing people to interact in only one format.
Hi Mike!
Great article, just found it searching through some backlinks. Got a bit interested in Lesleys question above regarding Facebook-comments; would you say that those are just as visible to Google and other search engines as “normal” comments? Ie, should we stick to the built-in WordPress comments-system, go for Disqus or the mentioned Facebook-comments?
We’re a local CRM-provider in the northern Europe and we’re trying to improve our SEO as much as we can, while still being 100% white-hat! Fair play should win in the long end =)
Will read through your other articles and tips, you seem like a great source!
Thanks Johan. There are obvious social marketing benefits to using Faceboook comments, but for me they don’t outweigh the fact that someone else owns my interaction with my readers. And they can ban you at any time, for any reason (or no reason), causing you to lose all that interaction.
From an SEO point of view, it’s better to use the wordpress comments system. Facebook blocks a lot of stuff from Google. It also draws the comments down dynamically, usually in an iframe, so any search engine sees that as not belonging to your site.
Hope that helps :)
Thank you for your answer Mike, it’s just as I suspected. I’m also against requiring a user to have a Facebook-account to be able to leave a comment, they do have many users but not everyone =).
I think you just have to be a little careful not to be spotted as spam if you are always commenting things like “Loved it” or “I agree”, with just short generic phrases. Commenting systems like Disqus or blogs using Akismet can start automatically blocking your comments.
So follow Mike’s advice and try to add something usefull to the content you are adding a comment.
That’s a really nice idea about linking to a charity.