5 Blog Commenting Best Practice Tips

This is a guest post by Nick Stamoulis. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Links are the currency of SEO and Internet marketing. The more quality one-way links has pointing towards it, the better it looks in the eyes of the search engines. Every site has a certain amount of established trust with the search engines and when one site links to another, it passes along a bit of that trust in the form of “link juice.” The more links a site has, the more link juice it has. This tells the search engines that this is a valuable and useful site (the idea being that better quality site will have more incoming links as they are more frequently referenced).

A link building campaign is the process of building up the number of inbound links your site has. There are many places to get a link, but a very popular and useful link source is through blog commenting. In order to get the most out of your blog commenting, here are 5 best practice tips.

1. Use a real name when possible

Sometimes larger companies don’t want to use an actual person’s name when blog commenting, incase that person leaves the company. But you should strive to comment using a real name whenever possible. This fosters trust with the blog owner and the blog’s community. Hiding behind a business name can be frowned upon, as you are less accountable for your comments.

2. Three sentence minimum

Blog commenting is not only useful for link building, but it is also a great way to build your brand and establish your company as an industry expert. Setting a 3 sentence minimum for your comments will help you make sure you are actually leaving a thoughtful comment behind. Blog owners can spot a stock comment (Great post! Very informative. Thanks so much!)a mile away.

3. Actually read the post

This may seem like “well, duh” thing to say, but you’d be amazed at how many people just leave a comment without actually reading the post. Usually they just read the first paragraph and rehash what the author said. You want to know that what you are saying is on-point. Posting an unrelated comment discredits yours authority and undermines your brand building. If it’s an exceptionally long post, then at least skim the whole thing, looking for key points.

4. Respond to other comments

Writing response comments is a great way to start a conversation with the blog’s other readers. Getting involved with the blog’s community can help you develop new connections and professional relationships. You never know who you might meet on a popular industry blog. Other industry professionals and potential clients tend to turn to the same thought leaders for the latest news and trends.

5. Comment early

Most blog posts go live in the morning, so they have all day to be read and indexed by the search engines. You want to be one of the first people to comment on a blog post, because it helps with your brand visibility. Other readers might scroll through the first few comments, but few will read all 102 of them. If you are at the bottom, you got the link but little else of value.

About the Author: Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a full-service web marketing and Boston SEO company. He also publishers the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, so check his website to subscribe.