Most of us have gone through SEO classes or webinars and been taught about SEO, how to write a blog, how to find keywords, and how many times to use them in your blog posts to get them to rank. All that fun boring stuff. Google crawls these posts and pages, and then indexes them in the search engines how ever it sees fit.
What you may not have known is that Google also indexes the COMMENTS on posts. In many cases, Google sees these comments as a separate portion from the post itself. In most SEO circles that I follow, it is thought that Google looks at this almost as a "social" portion of the site that is NOT generated by the author and this is important, just like it is thought that social media actions such as likes, shares, +1s and retweets help a post rank higher.
So how am I helping you to help me? Because if YOU make a comment using the same keywords (or similar keywords) as I do in my post, it is going to help me to rank higher. Of course, the same goes for all of the blogs out there. And same goes for YOUR blog if your commenters follow this simple rule.
Allow me to give you an example. I recently wrote an article called Tips On Selling Your Home In Dallas. The first comment on there is "Good tips, Brian. Great curb appeal is important when selling a home." This is a great comment because it uses several of my keywords - Tips, Curb appeal (which is what this portion of the article focused on) and selling a home. Comment number 4 came really close to being a perfect comment. Scott starts his comment off by saying "Brian, Great tips for selling a home in any city."
Can you see the patern here? Both of those comments reused keywords from my text and from the title, and (theoretically) this plays an important part in SEO factors on how your site ranks in the search engines.
In the future, when commenting on a blog post, take a few extra seconds to re-read the blog title and use some of the keywords in your comment. You will still get points for commenting and you will be hopefully helping the author to rank higher for their intended keyword. See? I'm helping you to help me.
Don't forget to reblog this post so that all of YOUR readers can help YOU rank higher.
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