Blog Commenting is an excellent way to build quality links to your site. As a fairly simple and efficient means of backlinking, it is ideal for deep linking and traffic purposes for every page of your blog/site.
Blog commenting is pretty simple, but there is a right way and many wrong ways to do it. We’re going to define the “right” way to do it now.
Whenever backlinking or optimizing, it is essential to remember your purpose: to increase your rank in order to get targeted traffic. With this in mind, it only makes sense to attempt to get targeted traffic while practicing SEO (the means IS the end). This means leaving thought provoking and authoritative comments.
If you take the time (1-3 minutes) to leave a thoughtful comment that demonstrates your understanding and authority on the given subject, you are much more likely to get people clicking through to your site. You want people to think, “Hmm this guys seems to know what he’s talking about. I wonder what he has to say on HIS site” *click*. That being said, there are even more incentives for leaving comments that add value
Just because you leave a comment does not mean that it is going to be approved. This is exactly why spamming blog comments is so stupid. Next to none of your comments are going to be approved, and most blogs you find that auto-approve comments have probably already been spammed to hell. Not to mention, a blog that approves spam comments is probably of a very low quality and likely won’t stick around for long.
Also, do you really want this kind of activity related to your business? I don’t want people finding spam comments all over the web linking back to my site. Leaving a higher caliber of comments is going to ensure you a much higher approval rating and be more beneficial for your rankings and business.
We want to maximize the effects of our link building efforts. It’s not worthwhile to spend time crafting thoughtful comments for every blog on the web – many won’t be worth your time. We are going to set the bar for pages that are going to be worth our link building efforts.
Since we won’t get very much traffic from the majority of pages we comment on, we aren’t going to bother commenting on pages that use nofollow on their comments. If you end up on a popular blog that uses nofollow, it might be worthwhile because of the popularity of the site. One well crafted comment on a well trafficked page could get you a bit of targeted traffic every month for a long time, and all just for a couple minutes of work. There is no set in stone cut-off point, but I usually don’t bother with a site using nofollow that has an alexa ranking greater than 100,000, and that is being a bit generous as far as traffic purposes go. Here’s the strategy:
The Strategy
1) Head to www.dropmylink.com
This site simply enters a search string into Google made to find blogs based on the platform they use, their domain extension, or by some other aspect of the site. We are going to search for KeywordLuv Blogs because they are mostly “dofollow”, they let you use anchor text (and approve it), and they also give you a link to your most recent blog post. What more could you ask for?
Just enter in your keyword and choose KeywordLuv blogs. You can always come back and change the keyword to a similar variant or change the criteria for the blogs you’re searching for, but I find it unnecessary most of the time. Once you do this search, you’re sure to find thousands upon thousands of results of which many will be well worth our time to comment on.
If you haven’t already, download the super helpful browser plugin SEO Quake. It is going to be an integral part of how we find worthwhile blogs to comment on.
2) Sort your results
We have just searched for KeywordLuv blogs that are relevant to our keyword, and they have showed up in order of relevance since we have searched in Google. What we are going to do is sort our first page by order of PageRank.
- They might get you targeted traffic (with a thoughtful comment of course).
- The Toolbar PR we see is only updated every few months. If this page is on a popular site there is a good chance that it might already have or in the future end up with some PR
3) Comment!
As you comment and go from page to page on Google, you’ll find that the overall relevance of the pages is lowering according to Google, but the quality is not. You will find high PageRank and popular pages well within the results. Just one search can give you a ton of blogs that will be beneficial to comment on.
[EDIT] Guys, there is something else very cool about this method that I didn’t directly address previously. We are aiming to get comments approved on pages with PR, HOWEVER (yea it’s a big one) even if these pages have a PR of 0, they are still likely worth commenting on. They’re still worth commenting on because they are relevant -> this is the cool part…
We know these pages are relevant to our keyword because Google has ranked them in order of relevance for us! So don’t be too hesitant to comment on a PR n/a or PR 0 page. PageRank is only of of hundreds of SEO ranking factors, and relevant links are very important.
Tips for getting comments to stick
There are a few tricks that I use to make sure that my time isn’t wasted and my comments stick. You can’t guarantee an approval, or that it will happen quickly as we will inevitably comment on some not-so-recent posts. However, it’s not out of your hands, here are a few things I do to increase my approval rating:
1) Quote text from the post
This is an especially effective method imho. Taking a sentence or fragment from the post and commenting on it proves you are not a spammer, gives you something to focus your comment on, and generally spurs conversation and adds value to the page. I have found this technique to be very effective for increasing the stick rate of comments.
2) Be agreeable
This isn’t exactly a specific method, but it’s definitely a good approach to commenting. Many people think they should be controversial to create a buzz around their comment. This sounds better than it works out in practice. You can disagree and provoke a response from the admin, but only if you are careful not to take a stance that is overly opposing or disagreeable. Why? Because no one wants to approve a comment that is going to hurt their image on their own site. Think about it from the webmaster’s position. Even if the disagreeable comment can be easily countered, I usually won’t take the time to argue with someone on my own site. I’d rather just trash their comment and move on – my time is better spent building links and promoting my site. Also, if you leave a comment with an opposing view and then the webmaster rebuts you, is that really going to make you look like an authority? It’s much more effective to post agreeable comments that present a different point of view or add to the discussion rather than oppose it.
3) Reply to the Admin’s post
Replying to other people’s posts proves you’re obviously not a spam-bot. Also, it’s a good way to build upon the discussion and add value to the site/page. These comments get approved much more often. Replying specifically to the blog admin’s comments makes this technique even more effective as the admin is likely to respond meaning that your comment will get approved and create a buzz. This isn’t always an option since there won’t be a post by the admin on most pages you comment on, so use it when you can.
There is of course only one step left to take – indexing. Blog comments are likely to get indexed without any additional effort, but I never like to cross my fingers or wait when it comes to results. Copy and paste into a text document every page you comment on and come back in a week. Find and ping all of the pages where your comments have been approved. There will probably be a few less-maintained blogs where your comments have yet to be approved – forget about these. It’s not worth your time to check back up on these URLs everyday when your comments might not get approved for weeks, months, or ever. If they do they do, if they don’t they don’t.
Bonus Tip
As we know, relevance is the name of the game. With the above strategy we are commenting on relevant pages and posting super-relevant links (we use anchor text). However, there is one more thing you can do to make your backlinks even more relevant.
The text surrounding a link effects what Google thinks the page on the other side is all about. If you include your keyword in your comments, you will effectively increase the relevance of your backlink and enhance the results you get from these comments.
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