Practical Web Programming

Monday, December 03, 2007

Uncommon Ways to Increase Website Traffic: Blog Comments

Blogs are everywhere today in the Internet. In fact there are more than a hundred millions of blogs today and more than a hundred thousand are being built everyday.

Blogs has a comments section, except it the owner disables it. Bloggers use comments to interact with each other and use it to make a "connection" to thier readers. Others use it as a medium to ask for a link exchange - as I have done and still doing. And many more.

So What's in a Comment? How Can I Gain Traffic From It?

Most blogging engine, especially Wordpress, allows you to put your name, email address and your website link in the comment section. Others like Blogger, only allows comments and the default link to you profile. But regardless what blogging engine, you can put your links in the comment area.

See below for some benefits you can gain from commenting to blogs.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search result ranking of search engines like Google, is based on many factors. One of them is the number of links and anchor text consistency to a website. The higher the number of link and the consitency of the anchor text, the higher you go up to the search result page.

One good example is the word "here". Make a google search of that word and you will see that the number one in the result page is the Adobe Reader Download. There is no connection of the word "here" with Adode, but since most website owner use the word "here" to direct their users to the Adobe download page, Google's search algorithm think it is relevant to the website and so puts it to the top.

2. Exposure
One way to increase your traffic is to make others know that your site exists. Putting your link in comments is one way to do it. This really works as some visitors are curiuos about the blogs visitors and they are enticed to click your link.

3. Connection
As I said earlier, you can make a connection to other bloggers by using comments. Once your connections are stablished, it becomes easy for you to promote your other websites to other bloggers.

Summary
Commenting in other blogs is a good way to promote you website and to letting others know that you (and your website) exist in this virtual world. It also helps you form connections with other bloggers.

Two important notes is to always use the same anchor text everytime you put your link. And to be sensible always in your comments so that blog owners will not delete it.

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