Commenting Your Way To Free Traffic

Blogs are very personal things and with the exception of a few very well known blogs (usually owned by people who are very good at branding themselves or businesses), most are fairly lifeless in terms of visitor activity. The blogger writes an article, puts time and effort in to it, and although people might read it, not many people feel compelled to leave a comment.

Now, I'm not sure about you, but when I make a blog entry and someone makes an intelligent comment on what I've written, I nearly always click their link to see what site they own. The same goes for if I'm visiting a new blog and there are only a few comments, if the person has made an interesting and useful enough comment, I will click their link to see what else they have to say.

Some might say that blog commenting is futile in terms of SEO because virtually all the blogs are using the 'nofollow' tag (which tells search engines not to count this link as a 'vote' for that website). While this is true, you can't discount the fact that search engines may change their ranking algorithm in the future, so leaving a link on a relevant website could pay dividends in the future, not to mention all the referral traffic you will get (and hence are not relying on the search engines any more.

So how do you find relevant blogs to comment on? It's very simple, Google has a service called Google Alerts which lets you enter a keyword or phrase and whenever a new page appears in their index with this word or phrase, they will email it to you. You can set the alert up to be notified as and when the pages appear or a more sensible option is to get a summary report either weekly or daily.

In the report it will give you a link to all the new blogs that are relevant to the website you are trying to get traffic to. You then simply need to head over and leave a relevant comment. Some people say you should drop your keyword in the link as well, but I'm undecided about this. Maybe a better option would be to say "My Name from My Website" as the link. I know if I think the comment is borderline spam with a keyword, I nearly always delete it.

The key is to also leave a useful comment instead of what I like to call a 'me to' comment which would be something along the lines of 'great post, thanks!' or 'I really like what you have to say'. Offer your opinion or give an example based on your experience or point someone to another website (not yours) to show you care about commenting, not just trying to get the link.

Don't be overly concerned if the blog appears lifeless in terms of other visitors commenting, this is probably a good thing because you'll get the blog owner commenting on it and any stray visitors - especially if you comment is the only one.

One thing to be aware of though is that the blog entry isn't too old. If the last blog entry on the site was from a few years ago you can probably assume the blog is dead or not maintained, therefore your comment might not even be read or published.