Blog commenting

People are always asking how to get their site listed in Google Alerts. The answer is simple, just comment on those sites that you find with Google Alerts. Google doesn’t send alerts for every mention of a search term. It only delivers results from sources it considers authoritative for these words. It isn’t as simple as PageRank, since that is a measurement of the site’s overall influence. You can get alerts from sites with a wide range of PageRank, but they all are sites that Google feels are important for that specific search term.

All you have to do is follow Google’s advice and focus your blog commenting on those sites that you get in Google Alerts. If Google sees links to your pages from these sites, it will assume that you too are authoritative for these keywords. Repeat this often enough, and soon you’ll also be showing up in Google Alerts.

Tagged as: Blog commenting, Google Alerts

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The most important thing to keep in mind when doing blog commenting is to go for quality rather than quantity. The temptation is to just set up Google Alerts for your keywords, and comment on every site that shows up. But that can be counter productive in a number of ways. You’ll waste time on sites that won’t deliver any traffic or SEO benefits, and you’ll end up writing quick, boilerplate comments that are so off-topic and spammy that they get deleted or blocked. I find that well-written comments on sites with a high PageRank are the most effective in generating high-quality traffic.

If you follow my simple, step-by-step plan, you can build qualified traffic to your site and increase your Google PageRank in just 30 minutes a day. If you want to follow along with this example, you can open the public version of my AlertRank account:

1. I find it easier to spread out my keywords into separate Google Alerts, so I usually start my day by selecting all the alerts for the search term “google alerts”.

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2. Comments on recently published pages are much more likely to be read and followed, so I limit the date range for my alerts to the last 7 days.

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3. Then I click the column heading for the AlertRank quality score to sort the highest ranked alerts first. The AlertRank value is based on Google PageRank, but also incorporates other values, like Alexa traffic stats, so the most read and highest ranked sites have the highest value. Now I can see the best alerts for commenting right at the top of my listing. I keep my alerts listing set up to show the comments value as well, so I know in advance if a site allows comments before I even try reading the full post. That saves a lot of time.

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4. I start at the top of the list and work my way down. I don’t comment on each page I check. I want to make sure I can add something of value. When I find a post that seems like it would be of interest to people who’d benefit from our product, I try to leave an informative comment that starts with the basic point of the author and expands on it. Along with the link to my website that the comment form allows me, I try to include a link to one of my blog posts in the comment. I find that including that link in the middle of my comment has the greatest chance of getting it approved. I almost never link directly to our product’s home page. People following that link are too likely to bounce off right away. If I send them to my blog, they have a greater chance of becoming engaged.

5. I limit myself to 2 or 3 comments for each search term. That lets me work on just the highest ranked. By running multiple Google Alerts, I make sure I have plenty to choose from. My 43 search terms deliver a total of about 1,200 alerts per day. Since I have them all coming to Alertrank, I don’t have to worry about my mailbox becoming cluttered. During the day I also want to comment on important alerts as soon as they arrive, so I have AlertRank only deliver them by email if they are very highly ranked.

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Overall I find that blog commenting is one of the most effective marketing vehicles available. Not only is it free, but we get much better quality visitors than we do from Adwords. I’m not sure who clicks on Adwords ads, but they have the attention span of a gnat. Visitors from blog comments stay on the site much longer, view more pages, and convert to sales at a much higher rate.

Blog comments also build backlinks from high ranked sites, which builds the search ranking of our site as well. This creates a positive cycle, with more comments leading to more search visitors. It’s all good.