7 Reasons To Leave Blog Comments
Photo By Tim Morgan
Consistently leaving high quality comments on other blogs is a great way to market and grow your own blog (and your personal brand). Here is my list of seven reasons why I think you should make commenting part of your blog development strategy:
1.) Link Building
As long as the blogger has not set nofollow tags on their comments, every little nugget you leave will be a link to your blog which will help with your SEO efforts. The theory goes build as many links as possible from high quality sources and your SEO will improve.
2.) Attract Attention
If you are leaving comments on a bigger more established blog, there is a very good chance you will attract the attention of the blogger. Use this exposure to pitch guest post ideas, or gain attention by the blogger posting about one of your articles
3.) Disagree or Add to the Post
If you are able to disagree or add to a post, this will increase yoru profile as a subject matter expert. Adding quality comments arguing against or extending the origional post.
I would add one thing to this, and that is be nice, coming across as a troll when you attack someone you disagree with is weak and pathetic, bring someone round to your side of teh argument with quality analysis no name calling.
4) Extending the Converstation
leaving comments extends the converstation, it helps to build a community on yourfavourite blog, and if you are conversing a lot, your profile can onlyy increase.
5.) Give The Blogger Some Support
When a blog is new, it feels like you are posting into a void, no-one is leaving comments or giving you feedback. If you come across a new blog give them a little boost by leaving them a comment, tell them you like their work and give supprot on their posts., Be nice youre-karma can only increase.
6.) Increase your Profile
I have already touched on the fact that commenting can increase your profile, the mechanics of this depend upon your chosen blog to comment upon, selecting high profile blogs in your niche, and adding valuable content can increase your profile to the readers of that blog, who in turn may visit your own blog and hopefully become one of your readers.
7.) Make New Friends
Lastly, leaving a comment is just like saying hello in the real world, it can be the start of a beautiful new realtionship, say hello today instead of skulking in the background.
Wrap Up
Add copious comments, DO NOT just say “nice post” that is sooo lame, and it is obvious to everyone reading the comments that you are link building, add value, be useful and have a converstation.
Got anything to add to this post, please leave a comment below, let’s chat!
Related Posts
How To Change Your Slug For SEO
Photo by arnj
One of the most important things to change on your blog for seach engine optimisation or SEO is your slug.
Just in case you have been living under a stone like our erstwhile friend the slug and do not kjnow what SEO is, then a quick definition is in order. Search engine optimisation is the the process of making your blog or website as attrative to Google and it’s chums yahoo and MSN so that when someone type in a phrase, for example wordpress coaching (give it a go and see who is there) you come out on the first page near the top.
What is A Slug
The slug is the bit that follows your domain name and points to your post, for example:
wpdude.com/this-is-a-slug
By default on a WordPress blog, the slug looks something like this:
wpdude.com/?p=22
As far as a search engine is concerned this is not a very useful, it says nothing about the post, there are none of the key phrases people would type in to identify the post, in short, you are going to have a very hard job to drag people in from Google with a slug like that.
Changing Your Slug To Something Useful
All is not lost, you can change the default slug to something far more useful. From your WordPress blogs’ admin console, scroll down to settings and click on permalinks.
From there select a custom permalink structure and set it to be /%postname%
What this does is to change the default slug configuration to be the title of your post, for example this post would have the slug:
how-to-change-your-slug-for-seo
The search engine has been fed much more information about what my post is about.
Removing Useless Words
There is a school of thought in SEO circles that you should remove all useless words from your slug and leave only hardcore keywords. The things to remove are “a, the, it, then” etc etc.
There is a plugin to do this for you, imaginatively called Seo Slugs, download it and activate the plugin. From that point forward your slugs will be trimmmed down by default. My new slug for this post now becomes:
change-slug-seo
The superflous words are cut down and hopefully Gooogle juice will flow in plenty.
Quick Get The Table Salt It’s Eatin’ The Lettuces
Don’t pour salt on your slug and kill it off, treat is nicely and you will be rewarded with organic search traffic from Google.
Get creative, think what people will type into google to find a post like yours, and match this to your slug.
The How To Video
I have created a screencast video of me doing the config on a real WordPress blog, enjoy.
[local /wp-content/uploads/2009/04/seo-slugs.wmv]
Random Posts
Integrating WordPress With Twitter
Photo nicked from Twitter
I ran a poll last week asking if you were planning to , or already had integrated your blog with Twitter. The results polarised into two camps, either you were already inhtegrating or you were looking into it. This post is for the later group of readers.
Why Integrate Wordpress with Twitter
Darren Rowse from Problogger brought to my attention the idea of a Homebase and Outposts approach to blogging and social media sites. This is something I strongly belive in this approach, read the post for a full descrption, but in brief it says that yoru home base (or blog) is your main property from where you do your main work, and the outposts are areas you push your work to. Using twitter integration tools you can simplfy pushing blogs posts from your home base out to your outputs.
The three main reason I integate with twitter are:
- The main reason I integrate with Twitter is to market my blog content to a wider auduence, this is made much more steamlined with Twitter plugins.
- Increasing productivity is another reaso0n to integrate, most bloggers spend a huge amount of time developing and marketing their site, if this can be made more efficient that time can be spent on other more important taks such as content development.
- You do not own our content on Twitter/facebook or any of the other social sites, you need a place to call your own where you house your original content. If you have a business blog, this will be where your call to action to generate income will be.
Enter The Plugin
There is always a plugin, and my Twitter integration plugin of choice that I use it Twitter tools by Alex King, it is a bi-directional post to tweet, tweet to post and tweet to widget fun fest
Download and install the plugin as you would any other, then the only other bit of configuration is to add your twitter user ID and password.
If you use other plugins, please feel free to tell me about them in teh commnets of thsi post.
Posts as Tweets
The main feature I use in this plugin is the ability to push posts as tweets into Twitter. Using this fucntionality I create a tweet which says “new at my blog Integrating Twitter with Wordpress http://tinyurl.com/xyc” this tiny URL then send Tweepl back to the original post.
You can push all posts to Twitter, or opt them out. I only push out my key work in this way not every little post I publish on my blog.
Tweets Summarised into A post
The plugin allows bi-directional updates so you can then republish your tweets as a post.
Due to the small nature of tweets you can opt to publish single tweets or a digest of daily or weekly tweets into a post.
This is not a function I use, but If you are pushing out a lot of short valuable content into Twitter it will make sense to expose this to yoru non-twittering readers.
Tweets in a Sidebar Widget
Last but by no means least is the ability to push your tweets into a sidebar widget rather than a blog post.
BONUS Integration
I don’t want to sound like an infomercial, but you get all of the twitter integration plus a bonus Facebook integration when you read thsi post.
Twitter has created a Facebook application. If you install the app on your Facebook page it will pull your tweets and stick them on your Facebook profile as updates.
I have decided which outpost to concentrate on (Twitter) but I always like an automated outpost with which I can expand my blogs audience.
Related Posts
POLL RESULT: Are You Integrating Your Blog With Twitter?
Photo By a Barber Shop
I have been running a poll this week on my blog (and on Twitter) asking the question, are you integrating your blog with twitter?
The results were quite interesting, approximately 50% of respondants were already integrating their blog posts into twitter using plugins, another 50% were looking into how to do this, and one grumpy Guss said NO, I’m not integrating.
So with this in mind, in the very near future I will be writing the definitive guide (not to put too much pressure on my shoulders) on how to integrate your blog with twitter. Post to tweets, tweets to posts, widgets full of Twittering and a bonus guide on how to integrate all of this into your facebook account.
Stuff that one one in your pipe and smoke it 
Can I suggest you subscribe to my RSS so you don’t miss out on this earth shattering experience.
Random Posts
What Is Comment Spam?
- Photo by arndog
You may have noticed very weird comments appearing on your blog. The comments usually don’t make sense and they link to bizzare domain names. These comments are probably spam left by people (or automated spam bots) in an attempt to increase the target domains visibility on the search engines.
Why Do People Commit Comment Spam?
In one word links. Every comment on a blog creates a a link back to the target blog. The game is to create as many links back to a site as possible in an attempt to improve organic rankings on search engines. This is a black hat SEO technique.
What Do Links Mean?
It sounds like a game show host’s catch phrase, what do links mean? (audience reply) Google Juice! One of the measures of a site to improves it’s position on the search engines is the number of links it has from other sites.
How Much Of A Problem is It?
The numbers are huge, a picture tells a thousand words, so see this screen from Akismet (more about this later).
How To Spot Comment Spam
It is usually very easy to spot comment spam, the comment usually is meaningless or off topic, the domain names will be random connections of letters or look very suspect.
What Can You Do About It
As always if there is a problem in WordPress, there is a plugin to solve it. In this case my preffered anti spam plugin is Askimet.
This excellent little plugin analyses all comments left on your blog and any suspect ones are quarantined in a holding area to be deleted (automatically after 30 days if you configure it so) or to be marked as not spam (or ham as it is know).
The system reports back to a central database so the spam engine is always adapting to new methods of spamming.
Review Your Commenting Configuration
Another way to control comment spam is to ensure you control who can comment and how.
From your WordPress dashboard review settings -> discussion
Review these configurations and tighten these controls if you are suffering from a lot of comment spam.
Conclusion
If 80% of comments left on blogs are spam, there is a huge problem which must be helping sites gain traction on the search engines. Help to can the spam by installing pluigns such as Akisment and delete all spam on site.
Related Posts
POLL: Are You Integrating Your Blog With Twitter?
Photo By a Barber Shop
Loading ...Random Posts
Twitter
