Increase Comment SEO: Leverage What You Know
We learn a lot of skills for increasing SEO at Wealthy Affiliate and a good many of them can cross over into areas we might not be thinking about. One of these is keywords. We know to check our keywords carefully as a starting point for writing posts and pages and to search for those long tail keywords that will increase our chances to reach page one in Google rankings. Have you thought of doing the same for comments?
Leverage your keywords skills for better comments SEO. You can think of comments as post extensions and if you use keywords in your post, why wouldn't you in your comments? Kyle has noted the importance of creating quality comments that have some substance and part of the reason is because they literally extend the post.
Increase Word Count
So if you were paying attention to the quality of the writing and keywords in the post, why would you let that go for the comments? Between a comment or question that is asked and your reply its fairly easy to add another 1000 words to your post in comments alone. Return to your keywords list if you keep lists in Jaaxy (a good reason to right here) and make these words work for you.
Another skill that can be leveraged in comments is links, most especially internal links and authority links. Because comments are more free-form than a formal article, you can drive comments toward including authority references on and off your site. The comments might feel like "extra stuff" but they all count toward the site authority that you build. There is a handy links button in the comments editor that makes adding internal links easy to do.
Use Comments Editor
Lastly, the comments editor can be used to edit and update your comments as a way to update your article and score rankings. Do you have an older article that Google is ignoring? Return to the commnents and see if you can upgrade your responses with more information, better keyword use, and authority references. It could be as simple as adding links to artcles you have since published on your own site.
Comments are not just a bit of fluff at the end of the real writing which is the post. They aren't a PS (post-script) that is secondary to the article. Comments are more like an SEO opportunity that we get to explore long after the post has been published. Leverage the skills you know for post writing so that your comments do some work toward increasing site authority.
Recent Comments
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I'm learning a lot about comments...they can be edited and enhanced to improve rankings before approval. I find this baffling...it's like writing own comments to benefit our sites. But, I guess that is what is accepted.
Debbie
Yes the editor gives you complete access to any comment written by others or yourself no matter how long ago it was published. I was surprised when I first found that as well. But there it is. I have edited other people's comments to fix typos, especially when the typo made it hard to understand what the person was saying.
I was not aware of updating comments but I know the words in the comments reflect your post.
Randy
If you go to the comments tab on your site editor menu you can go into your comments. Hover over the bottom left corner and an editing menu will appear. You can hit edit from here to edit any comment on your site no matter how old.
Excellent post. But if i am understanding this correctly, if we add links when responding to comments on our own post, it isn't considered spam? But adding links to our comments on others post it is spam, right?
Yes, dont add links to comments you leave on other people's posts. This is about using your own comments and adding links to your replies.
I had not either until I read a blog on the importance of replying quickly to a comment. I had been putting that at the bottom of my daily to do list but that was a mistake. Search engines can ding you for leaving comments hanging since it indicates site neglect.
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I thought we were allowed to fix the comments if there were typos our grammar errors? Not make them say what we want? That to me isn't right.
You can make your own reply to a comment say whatever you want and yes you can update or enhance it later. If you "fix" another person's comment to say what you want, I guess that's up to you. There is nothing other than your own sense of ethics to stop you from significantly changing what the comment says. Follow what you feel is right. I fix typos and grammar to a certain extent.
Yeah, I'm with you. I might fix a typo or grammar error but that is it. Going any further would be wrong is how I feel. We asked for THEIR comments, not our own. : )