Using Blog Comments to Drive Traffic to Your Website
The greatest percentage of traffic to most websites comes directly from one or another of the search engines. This means that the key to generating traffic to your company’s website is to have a high ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and this is generally achieved by optimizing your web pages to be highly visible to the crawlers that the search engines use to index websites. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about balancing valuable content with the right amount of links from other sites to create a web site that the search engines see as contributing valuable information on the keywords attached to it.
Creating good content and keeping the flow of information fresh is a big task, but one that is in the control of the web master. Creating links back to your good content is a little bit harder, but it is still possible to do yourself, and there are a couple of strategies that you can pursue to build back links to your web page. The most obvious path is to post links on social media and bookmarking sites like Facebook or Digg, but these sorts of links have only a minor effect on SEO, and links that are posted on other websites are the ones that really improve your page ranking in the SERPs. The best links come from doing things like making guest posts on other blogs, but those sorts of opportunities are often difficult to arrange and don’t happen often enough to be a reliable source of fresh incoming links. There is a long term strategy that is able to create a lot of good quality links relatively easily; leaving comments on other blogs.
Most bloggers want people to leave comments on their blogs and are excited to get them when they come along. It is an accepted part of the etiquette of the blogosphere that when someone leaves a comment on one of your blog posts that they are also using it as an opportunity to leave a link to their own website and the majority of bloggers that comment on other’s blogs have SEO in the back of their minds at the very least. Of course, simple spammy messages and criticism are unlikely to be published by many webmasters so it is necessary to engage yourself in the blogger’s conversation to have a chance of having your comment published by them. Often it is possible to become known for your incisive comments on someone else’s blog and to have a number of their followers come over and subscribe to your website as well. It isn’t uncommon for bloggers to swap comments in an affiliate arrangement that benefits both websites.
Links built in this way still have a shelf life, but it is far longer than the time decay of social media postings. It is possible to build a good number of back links to your site by spending as little as half an hour a day surfing through some of the websites in your niche. After a short time, the best twenty or thirty blogs in your industry and associated businesses will become obvious and it will become easier to find posts that you can easily and quickly leave a relevant comment on. Taking the time to read and comment on what others are saying about your industry is the best way to join the conversation online and to build your Internet presence. Successful Internet marketing is about making connections and becoming engaged and the most effective way to engage people in your niche is to leave your opinions and insights on their blog feeds.
