5 Ways Of Using Comments To Increase Your Web Presence

1. Using Facebook Comments:

Many small businesses add Facebook comments to their business blogs. However, many do not know that Facebook comments add ZERO value to the SEO of the site as far as Google is concerned. Why? Because, Facebook comments are served in an iframe and therefore Google spiders won’t be reading these comments. All your comments belong to Facebook, not to your site. Now, this is something you must know, if you do not know this already. Google uses comments to determine how influential an article is and thus losing out on comments may mean a lot for any blogger. So, one may consider alternate commenting options like Akismet plugin for wordpress.

Facebook as a commenting platform offers a huge tool to create and maintain reputation for any professional or business. You may not want to add Facebook Comments to your blog, but, you can certainly use Facebook Comments to comment on other blogs which you like. When you leave intelligent comments on your industry related blogs, Facebook could know who carries a high reputation on certain type of content. After seeing the possible implications of Facebook commenting, as a blogger, I will think many times before implementing Facebook commenting as it has minimal SEO value. However, it can certainly add value to readers as the comments become more meaningful for group of readers related on Facebook. Commenting on all relevant Facebook posts may be very time consuming, and here you may think of hiring a Social Media Virtual Assistant who can work on your behalf.

2. Using Disqus Comments:

It is a very impressive system that brings a lot of new capabilities to us bloggers. For example, the ability to do threaded replies is very good. This means anyone can engage anyone else directly, rather than replying in general to all. The threaded replies are indented, making it easy to track sub-discussions. I would say this is one of my favorite features though many bloggers have switched to Disqus commenting, this doesn’t have a greater impact on indexing on Google. It would just helps in increasing your business reputation as it is strongly connected to a large discussion community. The reason it doesn’t help in Google ranking is, it allows only no-follow comments that would not give any back link to your site which would certainly be a drawback for link building. Another disadvantage is all the comments are stored on Disqus server and not on your wordpress site. Hence if the server goes down or if something happens, we will be unable to retrieve the data from the server. Therefore what would be other option?

3. Commenting On Relevant Industry Blogs:

This is the best way of increasing traffic to your site if you have the time and patience to read the articles and then leave a meaningful comment. If you have a Social Media Virtual Assistant who is intelligent enough to leave comments which will add value to your online reputation, this may be the best tool for you.

How it works?

When you post keyword rich interesting comments to high page ranking blogs that are related to your business/product, it would make your readers possibly click through to your site thereby increasing your site traffic. A few things to keep in mind while using this approach to gain some links and reputation- you may post comments in a site that has less number of comments so that the possibility of you getting noticed and a link is higher. Internet Research will help you find competitor sites and the relevant industry sites where you have to make your presence felt. Secondly, posting comments to only dofollow sites will fetch you links and traffic. A bad way to do commenting would be to spam others’ blog and websites. Commenting can gain you good reputation if you have something to contribute or some informative/informed statements to make. Else, sooner or later, you will be blocked and ignored.

4. Using Linkedin Comments:

Though LinkedIn comments are less popular than Facebook in terms of volume, Linkedin is more useful for SEO and for building more credibility. Google and Bing can easily index your business information in Linkedin . The extent to which you can leverage your Linkedin profile depends on how much your profile is keyword optimized. As per Schrum in a webinar, “When optimizing a profile on LinkedIn, the person with the most keywords wins”. Hence make sure that your profile and business details are described in details and the content must have more keyword density. While commenting on Linkedin, make sure your comment makes sense to your professional contacts on this site. Linkedin is a purely business networking site and thus your tone must be very professional here. Read “Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn ” written by top blogger Guy Kawasaki to know more on the best use of LinkedIn.

5. Using Twitter Comments:

How Twitter helps increase your traffic?

What Google does is, it would fix a score for each Twitter account. The higher authoritative i.e the trustful information it provides and the age of the account matters to get the high score. Hence a high score twitter can get a better rank in Google search engine. Google also considers retweeting information of the Twitter account of a blog/site that has trusted information. Hence when people retweet your site, it will increase your online reputation. It is wise to add Twitter share feature to your blog/website as the more people share your site and content, the better reputation you get online.

Also, when you comment on other high ranking sites and your comments are retweeted, you certainly get recognition as a active participant in your targeted content category. Want to learn more on how to use twitter for your business effectively? Read this case study of ‘40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them’ b y Mashable. If you feel it is too much of work to make Twitter work for your business, hire a Social Media Virtual Assistant to make it easy for you.

Finally, make commenting a part of your overall Social Media marketing strategy but do not rely on it 100%. The goal is to be wherever your product/industry is discussed and make your presence felt. People will observe your tweets, Facebook comments, your blog posts, and website and also what others are saying about you. All this adds up to build your online presence in a way that differentiates you from the crowd. Do you use Commenting as your online reputation tool? Share with us in your comments..