How to leave comments for the best SEO?

I’ve gotten email asking about how to leave comments so that they are full of SEO goodness.

Blogs and forums have the best potential for leaving comments.

Blogs

In blogs, they usually ask for your name, email address, your web site address (URL), and your comment. When the comment is approved, they link your name to your web site, next to your comment.

If they do not ask for the website URL, they can’t link to it and you don’t get any goodness from the comment. Look at other comments on the site and check if any of them are linked to external sites.

It is possible to put your URL in the comment itself. Sometimes it automatically becomes an active link and sometimes it just sits there looking like text. At least someone could copy and paste it, but that’s 3 steps harder than a real link. Check other comments to see how it works.

If you just throw your URL in the comment, it looks kind of spammy, so I wouldn’t do that. If there was a legitimate reason to put your URL in there, you might get away with it.

In order of effectiveness: 1. a blog that links your name, 2. a good reason to put your URL in a comment that is linked, 3. a good reason to put your URL in a comment that is NOT linked, 4. no reason to put your URL in a comment that is linked, 5. no reason to put your URL in a comment that is linked, 6. writing your comment on a piece of paper and leaving it on the sidewalk.

If you have the option to “subscribe to follow up comments via email”, do that. You might have started a conversation that you need to continue. (At the least, you get to mock all the weird stuff that other people actually write in their comments.)

One thing you might be tempted to do, if you’ve read my SEO book, is use your keywords as your “Name”. The good thing is that your site gets the benefit of not only getting a link, but the link is for your keywords. The problem with this is that everyone knows you are playing the system if you say your name is “Handmade Jewelry”. You lose credibility with the readers and the blog owner probably won’t even approve that comment, so you’ve wasted your time and annoyed the owner.

If you are a FireFox user (and why wouldn’t you be?), there’s a plug named “easyComment”, for the browser that populates common blog comment forms automatically. Install it, fill out the preferences with your name and URL, then any time you are on a blog post with a comment form, click the button and your name and URL are put into the form.

easyComment can be downloaded from here: easyComment https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9095/

Forums

Forums are a bit different. Again, check to see what others are doing and how the links work. Usually, you will have to create a profile with a “signature”. The signature is a bit of text that is inserted at the bottom of each of your posts, like a signature. Put your URL in there. Link it using your keywords if possible.

It’s possible to put your URL into the body of your post, but again, don’t just throw it in there. Have a good reason for mentioning it. “I was just discussing that very issue yesterday on my blog. See my post here: http://www.yoursite.com/post.html”. That’s a reasonable thing to do.

Try to use your keywords, but not too blatantly. Make sure they are giving you a real, working link. Check the other comments and posts to make sure you understand how that site works. Be interesting, genuine, authoritive, humble, and helpful.

You do want links for their SEO goodness, but you also want real people to be interested enough to come check out your site and start a conversation. Write for real people first, then review for keywords for the search engines second.

Now, go out there and leave some comments!