Closing off blog comments
I was making my rounds this morning and came across a nice piece on Blog Marketing Journal about business blog comments and how some companies handle them.
Some bloggers are quite precise in the way they handle their blogs. They perform very tight blog SEO strategies to ensure their blogs rank as highly as possible in the search engines. Sometimes you can go to extremes and find you are harming you blog or your blogs reputation.
One tactic I have seen used is to turn comments off on certain posts. The reason? They have crafted their post with carefully placed keywords and they feel that comments will dilute the keyword ratio.
Some bloggers do in fact take this approach, and I think it’s kind of silly.
First of all, as the article goes on to say, there is no magic keyword percentage when it comes to the content of your blog post and that post ranking well. There are more than a hundred factors when it comes to SEO, content and keyword ratios are only a few of them.
Secondly, if you are taking that much time to hone and perfect each post for some imaginary formula revolving around SEO, I’m going to venture to say that your blog probably isn’t that much of a resource to your users either. Because rather than creating that resource, you are focusing on spamming the engines in the hopes of a listing for a particular word or phrase.
So what happens even if you do get that listing is that your readers find a poor result. Not really what they were looking for when it comes down to doing business with you and your company. Odds are that the post they find will be staunchly written and dry. Or look like total nonsense.
Your business blog is a place for you to create new client relationships. The words you write are going to be the only thing your potential customers have to make that initial decision to move forward and do business with you. If they find something impersonal, they probably won’t budge when it comes to your calls to action. Because there’s no interaction.
That’s why blog comments are so important. Because it gives those readers that interaction. Even if they aren’t the actual participants in a discussion in the comments. They may just want to read about how you converse with others.
Plus, one of the main objectives for company blogs is to generate consistent new content. Remember?
Those blog comments ARE new content. The search engine spiders ARE seeing new content added to those pages and they are seeing that growth. These are the indicators that they are looking for in order for your website to become a trusted resource.
So if you have a blog with closed comments or are closing off particular blog posts, for any reason, reconsider. Because those comments have value. A value that far outweighs some imaginary keyword percentage you’re trying to nail.
Stop spending so much time analyzing your stats and spend that time doing something that matters to your bottom line. Make your business blog a real resource.
The rest will come naturally.
Tags: Blog Comments, Blog SEO, business blog seo