Blog Comments Provide Unique SEO Benefits
Sometimes good things have unforeseen effects, and sometimes those effects render unexpected benefits. Such is the case with comments posted on your blog entries. Blogs are obviously springboards for increased traffic and community building for websites, however, the actual content in user comments provides more than mere justification that people are visiting your website and formulating an opinion related to your work.
Each new post a visitor affords your blog is essentially a free contribution to the well-being of your website. Not only do search engines deem the material as updated content on your website (regular updates impress search engines and persuade them to crawl your site more often), but they also consider the posts as actual content. While this can have some adverse effects, it enables you to rank for terms you might not normally target.
You wouldn’t intentionally flood your work with misspelled words and grammatical errors in order to rank for a specific term, because most visitors happening upon your website would likely hit the back button after concluding your website is an utter mess. However, a visitor using misspellings and poor grammar in your posts won’t reflect negatively upon you, which liberates the lexicon you can target.
For example, a Des Moines Web Design company might benefit by ranking well for “DesMoines Web Design”, but wouldn’t dare publish web content that makes little sense, let alone misspell the name of their home city. But should a visitor write that exact phrase in a post on the web designer’s blog, well, then that’s a beast of another burden. The design company’s website is recognized for the phrase without sacrificing the respect of visitors with an affinity for the English language.
The downfall to visitor blog posts is the continued rash of individuals posting spam on blogs. This usually comes in the form of surreptitious links, whereby the spammer posts a semi-legitimate comment that features a link to an unrelated website. Honest visitors will abandon your blog community if they continually find themselves being directed to pills and porn sites when the topic is strategies for investing in petroleum futures. So embrace the benefits of visitor comments, but always be leery of their intentions.
