The idea behind this simple concept is that you let other people, other than yourself, do the work for you on your own blog – and I am not talking about allowing guest posting to take place on your site (although that’s always a good idea).
Wait…What? What did I just say?
I’m talking about letting the community of your writers create content for you through the system of commenting. A lot of the times, you can do this without writing anything at all – all it really takes is a really good link to a really good YouTube video with a couple sentences that ask a really in depth question or give you a really strong opinion that you want to let out.
You do not need a 800 word article to keep make your readers commenting on a page. If you have an idea, a thought, a video, or simply a picture, that you think can generate a lot of conversation – conversation that you think people that visit the site will want to stick around and read – then it is worth it, and that is the best , and most natural way of participating in SEO!
Email Battles
Have you ever had a debate with someone via email? If you happen to be doing so, perhaps you should think about posting the debate (as long as it is OK with the person you are having the debate with) on the Internet. And if you have never done that before, perhaps you should consider doing so as they can be very entertaining and are a lot more fun and easy flowing than writing your average article. Plus someone else, be it one or more people, are once again doing at least half the work!
Forums
Forums may be a little extreme (and a lot of work), but if you have the type of website, or in the type of niche, that can generate a lot of chatter, and it makes sense to do it, then you should definitely think about starting one.
The perfect example is for tutorial or troubleshooting type websites. Many times users can answer questions for you, and not only will it increase the time spent on page by creating content that you don’t have to, but it will improve your customer service efforts – which can, a lot of the time, make or break your web site.
Getting People Outside of the “Good Ole Boy” System to Comment on Your Blog
Now this strategy requires you to prepare a little bit of content but it is one that can bring a plethora of new types of traffic to your blog. This is called the cross promotional technique – and it is something that can be very useful.
What it entails is blogging about a very trendy topic, and relating it to your blogging niche in some way, shape, or form. For example, if Justin Bieber (sorry I had to reference him) makes news headlines for some publicity stunt, and your blog is strictly about eBay perhaps you should write about Justin Bieber and eBay, and what is selling on eBay at the time.
If you do things like this (and are constantly doing so when it makes sense to) then you will be able to pull in a lot of traffic. This is because your topic will probably have little or virtually no competition at all and because of this you will be able to get to the top of the SERPs with virtually no off-site SEO (like hiring an SEO company for link building services).
Because of the uniqueness of your content, and its ability to captivate a new audience through gaining readership via highly unique search queries, it is a very high possibility that you will be able to pull in a thunderstorm of new and exciting comments (as long as you are able to decently engage your audience) as your topic will be new, unique, and trending.
This is great, especially post panda, as the more time people spend reading your page (comments included) the better chance you have a ranking in the SERPs as time spent on Page was a key factor Post-Panda. However there are some key things you want to keep in mind if you are going to use this tactic.
Side note: In case you are unaware (or you have been living under a rock otherwise) the Panda update was a substantial algorithm update made by Google in the early months of this past year that effected many websites known as “content mills.”
Now this is really only relevant if you are doing this all the time (which probably will not be the case) but it is better to be safe than sorry.
What you want to do is make sure you aren’t breaking any of the “Panda Rules.”
Don’t:
- Include irrelevant Ads in the Article
- Not relate a trending topic to the main topic of your website
- Make your post irrelevant to other articles you have done – find a way to relate them to one or two other articles so that your bounce rate does not increase
Basically, what you want to do is make sure that you are in no way resembling a content mill – which becomes more and more important the more of these types of articles you create. However if you find a way to relate it to your niche, you should be just fine.
Comments can sometimes be the best content on the page. You want to make sure that you are providing users the opportunity to participate in your community by implementing new a great ideas within your blog – even if they are somewhat out of the ordinary, or not considered traditional blogging techniques. There is no “one size fits all” when you talk about what the length of a page should be in terms of words, paragraphs, or anything else like that!
Author
This article was written by Philip Russell. Philip helps to run and maintain www.inetzeal.com – a company that provides a white label link building service. In his spare time he likes to write about SEO, SEM and Internet marketing.
