Does blog posts comments help SEO?
Yes. Comments on blog post helps on SEO if it is a keyword rich and well written high quality comment. Some blogs might see improvement in their blog post search engine optimization and get you more visitors to their blog.
When we talk about comments on your blog, many are wondering whether does it helps to have a blog post comment section to be switched on.
It has been a question that is being asked since the first day when blogging starts. There are two contradictory idea on blog post comments.
On one side, there are people who are adamant that comments helps you to stay connected with your audience and maintain credibility .
While on the other side there are people who argues that the time requires to manage comments is not worth it.
What is Blog Comment?
A blog comment is a comment that readers submits through a blog form on one of your blog post. Blog comments can be an indicator to show how helpful and how popular your blog post is. Blog comment is also a tool that readers use to interact with the author and other readers of the blog post.
A lively comment area could be an excellent way for you and your readers to create a community around your blog. Visitor of your blog post can ask questions, give feedback, share their own idea, and much more.
Normally a blog comment appears at the end of you blog post, together with the commenter’s title, the date, and time your audience post the comment.
What is the Use of Blog Comment?
Everybody has their own reason to use blog comments on blog post.
Bloggers who aims on SEO perspective, use comments to generate backlinks, some use blog comment for spreading knowledge, some even use blog comment as an interaction tool and etc.
Blog commenting has it own role to draw in traffic. For example, attracting visitors onto your blog and build a relationship with the readers.
As I’ve previously stated above, some people do blog commenting for the purpose of SEO to get backlinks, and also attract website traffic.
Let’s get more detailed into this. Blog Comment Is For:
1) Building Backlinks
This is one of the most important reasons to do blog commenting. If you feel that your blog or site isn’t getting the numbers of traffic you want, one of the reasons could be that your blog isn’t getting authority from the search engine.
If you’re commenting on other’s blog site, you’re indirectly creating a backlink for your own blog that could allow you to increase your blog traffic.
2) Getting Traffic
Anyone who’s commenting on a blog post is going to leave a backlink, that means, backlinking is a method to generate traffic.
When writing your comments, make sure you it’s appropriate and relevant to the topic of the blog post.
3) Build Relationships
One the best way to build relations with our audience is through blog comment.
At the beginning, building relationships could take some times, but the more time you spend of blog comments, people will start to notice about you.
4) Brand Recognition
When you’re doing blog commenting or maybe blogging, you did that on your focus niche, so you’re able to generate traffic from that potential group of audience.
Even when the visitors do not comment your blog, your brand is sufficient to develop an impression on the user’s. Possibly, later when they want to buy a product, they may consider you.
How to Make Sure Blog Comments Help SEO
As far as other search engine and Google are concerned, blog comments are consider an additional content on a blog post.
That means if your blog post has 1500 words in length and you’ve 300 words of blog comments below, search engines will gauge your blog post as having 1800 words in total.
So, it means that your blog receive an additional free content! Besides that, blog comments not only encourage people to get engaged, but they enhance the blog itself.
But here are a few caveats to that.
Just like the content of your blog post, the blog comments have to provide something significant. Or, at least, they’re not spam.
In order for SEO purpose through blog commenting, you will still have to treat comments as they’re like the content of your blog. That means removing the spam comments and also deleting any broken links is very important for SEO.
The Benefits of SEO and Blog Comments
There are some inherent benefits of using blog comments to improve your blog SEO.
First, they’re a good opportunity for having latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords.
These keywords are actually synonyms for your main keywords in your blog post, and that allows your blog post to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, if you published a blog post with a topic called “Does blog posts comments help SEO?” and someone who read your post might comment “I agree, SEO is indeed helpful for SEO!”.
With that comment, you’ve the opportunity to get ranking for a search term that you normally might have missed in your blog post.
Google views comments as a part of a blog post. A blog post which is long and have a lot of comments is a great indication of quality.
Google might consider to give you a better ranking if the text in the comments includes a lot of relevant content which could be helpful to others, eventhough the your main keyword is not mentioned much.
Like most SEO ranking factors, this may change at any time. But for today, the comments section of your blog is a box of potential free content and LSI keywords which could improve your page rankings.
How to Stop Comment Spam on Your Blog (5 simple Solutions)
Sometimes, your blog post will receive comment spams which will hurt your blog. To stop comment spam on your blog, there are 6 solution which you can try.
Pick one which you think is the most relevant and apply it for your blog.
1) Create a list of ‘blacklisted’ words
Lots of spam comments contain a many of the recognizable keywords. You can easily spotted them and stop them from showing up on your blog comment.
You’re able to create a list of ‘blacklist’ words, and your blog will flag any comment that contains any of those words in your list.
It’s vital to choose the words carefully before adding into your “blacklist” list, so that you don’t delete comments by genuine posters.
2) Reduce the number of links allowed per post
Most comment spam is created to submit links to your comment section and trick readers into clicking on them. So, what we can do here is to set the limit of the numbers of links in your comments to slow down the spammers.
3) Set up a comment moderation system
In short, comment moderation is when you allow and approved comments that your readers submit to be shown on your blog.
It’ll need your authorization and approved manuall before it can be shown in your blog comment section. This can be time consuming, but if you’ve the time to do this, this can be a smart approach.
4) Restrict comment privileges to registered users
The objective of most spammers is to do commenting on as many sites and pages as possible.
If you you make the commenting process more complicated for them, they might just skip on your blog and move onto the next target.
This can be done by restricting comment privileges to only registered users on your blog. This puts an additional hurdle between spammers and the comment area of yours
5) Use an anti-spam plugin
Lastly, you can simply download anti spam plugins into your blog. These power tools will help you put a stop to comment spam and will help you in sorting the good comments out of the spams for you.
Akismet plugin is one of the example of plugin that you can use to combat spam comments.
Conclusion
Blog comments are nice to have, but it was not necessary.
Blog comment can be used to build a better relationships with your audience, provide social proof, or even to hear feedback and response of your audience.
It’s completely up to you whether to have it or not on your blog post. If the comments section of your blog is causing you stress or money, takes up a lot of your time and it didn’t benefits your audience, then you may consider to remove it from your blog.