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Blog commenting is part of the marketing toolbox for many business bloggers. It’s a great way to generate traffic and build your brand.

Just to clarify, I’m talking about leaving blog comments on other blogs with a link back to your site. You’re looking for blog comment forms like this:

However, if this tactic is done ineffectively, you can wind up with less than 5 visitors per comment.

Increase Your Traffic

Here are 5 ways to improve on this marketing tactic and receive more traffic.

1. Comment on high traffic blogs.

I think the most common blog commenting mistake is to comment on low traffic blogs. You can launch a huge commenting campaign, but if you’re targeting low traffic blogs, you won’t get a lot of traffic.

Many internet readers don’t read the whole post. This means a big percentage of the post’s visitors won’t even see your comment. To combat this, comment on high traffic blogs. The more traffic a blog receives, the more people will see your comment and the more people will visit your site.

This leaves us with the question: how do you estimate the traffic a blog receives?

I like using these three sites.

• Compete
• Quantcast
• Alexa

Compete and Quantcast give traffic estimates. Alexa doesn’t give specific traffic numbers but it does give traffic rankings. Also, Alexa seems to have more sites in its database than Compete and Quantcast.

Also, if a blog averages over 10 comments a post, it probably gets a lot of traffic.

2. Comment early.

Some high traffic blogs get over 20 comments a post. This can be a problem if you’re one of the later commenters. The later your comment is, the less likely an internet visitor will see it and visit your site. I try to leave one of the first 5 comments.

Luckily, many high traffic blogs have predictable publishing schedules. Look at the time stamps of their posts and see if there is a regular pattern for when they publish.

Also, you can try software like Comment Sniper (found via Internet Marketing Sucks) that notifies you whenever a new post is published on a blog.

3. Comment with high quality.

High quality comments get noticed and often lead the reader to visit your site. Leave useful information, not the short “Great post, I agree” type of comments.

I advise on writing longer comments – something over 3 sentences. Longer comments allow you to add more value. Yes, you can leave a high quality comment in 2-3 sentences, but that takes writing skill that most of us don’t have. So, write as many sentences, even paragraphs, as you need to make your point(s).

You can reuse your longer comments as blog posts. For example, I recently wrote an 800 word comment that I’m sure will get some traffic. I slightly rewrote that comment and made a blog post out of it too. This saved me blogging time and allowed me to kill two birds with one stone.

Writing a high quality comment can mean several things. You can provide your expert opinion by delving deeper into the post topic. You can share your personal experience. You can ask a question to get other people to comment or to get the blogger to clarify a point.

The basic principle is to set yourself apart from the other comments. Many comments are not high quality, so you have a great opportunity to get noticed by leaving high quality comments.

4. Comment on current posts.

The current posts will usually have more traffic than the older posts. This is because the home page of a blog has the most current posts and the home page is one of the highest trafficked pages.

Even if an older post receives a lot of traffic, it probably already has many comments. This means you can’t be an early commenter. However, you can leave an early comment on a current post if you act quickly.

5. Comment a lot on the same blogs.

Finally, a key to getting traffic from blog comments is to comment many times on the same blogs. This is a long-term branding move. As people consistently see your high quality comments, they’ll become interested in you. They’ll click over to your site and probably read a couple posts.

These visitors are what I call “pre-qualified” visitors. They’ve seen your comments and they’ve liked what they’ve seen, so they are predisposed to think highly of your blog before they even visit. They have pre-qualified themselves as a great visitor. These visitors oftentimes subscribe to your RSS feed and/or mailing list.

There is power in repetition. I don’t usually click on the comment link. However, if I keep seeing the same person comment, I get interested in them and check out their blog.

Over to You

Have you tried blog commenting? If you have, how has it worked out for you?

What other suggestions do you have for increasing traffic from blog comments?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an effective online marketing strategy that increases your search traffic by improving the search rankings of your site’s pages. By know, most webmasters realize that getting multiple top 10 rankings on Google is a very good thing.

There are technical aspects to SEO that are complicated, but luckily, the fundamental SEO principles of SEO are not rocket science.

To learn SEO, you should first understand the most weighty factors that search engines use to rank pages.

These following four elements make up a big chunk of the search engine algorithm. If you can nail these elements, you’ll be ahead of most bloggers and webmasters.

1. Title tag

Search engines look at the keywords in the title tag. If you have relevant keywords in the title tag, you’ll automatically rank better for those keywords.

In html code, the title tag looks like this:

The keywords in the title tag show up at the very top right of a web browser. Here is a screenshot.

For the popular blog software WordPress, the words in your post title will be included in the title tag.

2. Quality links from other sites

Search engines also look to see if quality sites are linking to your site. If you get a lot of links from quality sites, then you’ll see an increase in search traffic.

3. Anchor text

Anchor text are the words contained in a link. For example, I can link to my home page with the anchor text business blogs to rank better for that search term. However, it’s much more effective to get anchor text on links from other sites.

4. Body text

Finally, we have body text. With people using keywords to search, it makes sense that search engines would check out the text on a page.

Now you don’t want to mindlessly repeat keywords and make your blog posts spammy and hard to read. That’s called keyword stuffing and can get you penalized or even banned by the search engines. My guideline is to insert the keyword 1-2 times for a short post and 2-3 times for a longer post (500+ words). But don’t worry too much about this. As long as your content is readable, you don’t have to worry about keyword stuffing.

The Importance of Keywords

With three of the four factors above having to do with keywords, you can see that keywords are very important to search engines.

So, one of the first steps to improving your search traffic is doing keyword research.

For many people, keyword research is the most tedious part of the SEO process. However, most of your keyword research only has to be done once. Once you’ve generated a keyword list, you probably won’t have to do it again unless, of course, you start a new site in a different niche.

Also, keywords research is made a lot easier with keyword tools. I like to use these two keyword tools: SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google AdWords Keyword Tool. They are free to use.

I would type in the name of your industry. The keyword tool should then give you a lot of keywords. Next, simply look through the keywords and collect the ones that are relevant to your business. Then, begin to write blog posts that target those keywords.

If you have existing search traffic, it’s a good idea to check your keyword logs to see which keywords are already generating traffic. Oftentimes, you don’t have content that directly targets those keywords.

For example, my sister runs a dating blog where she plans to sell a dating ebook. One of her most popular keywords is “questions to ask girls”. She has an article entitled “Best Questions To Ask A Potential Love Interest” gets traffic for that keyword. I told her that if she wrote an article with words “questions to ask girls” in the title, she would even get more traffic.

Well, that’s it for this intro post about SEO. For more SEO and blogging tips, subscribe to our RSS feed. Also, feel free to email me at deebarizo ATT gmail DOTT com with your questions.