First of all I’d like to thank Gail for the opportunity to write for her blog. February has been THE month of guest-blogging firsts for me: first guest post published on my own blog and – this – very first blog post written for a blog I have enjoyed reading for a while now.
I am always on the lookout for easy ways to drive more targeted traffic to my blog and CommentLuv offers so many benefits that it just can not be ignored. If you haven’t heard of CommentLuv yet, I would suggest you to read Gail’s post on How CommentLuv Grows Businesses and Blogs.
What if there was an optimum way to use CommentLuv to get even more clicks from the comments I leave AND higher search engine rankings? Well, let me share 5 steps that I believe will result in just that: more traffic to your blog from both comments left and search engines.
Step 1: Register with comluv.com
Sounds obvious right? Registering your blog with comluv.com will allow you to have access to 10 links to “drop” in your comments instead of just one when you are not registered.
Not only that, but for just $4/link/year, you can choose to create permanent links (links that will always appear in addition to your last 10 blog posts) to “pillar articles” or posts targeting popular keywords you wish to rank for – Andy at CommentLuv calls these default links.
Benefits for user traffic and search engine rankings: a greater “pool” of links to choose from that gives you more time to promote individual blog posts.
Step 2: Choose the link that is the most relevant
Having now access to 10 links or more (if you bought additional URLs), your regular visits to the blogs in your feed reader should entice you to always select the link that is the most relevant to the post you are commenting on. By “most relevant” I mean the post on your blog that discusses a similar subject to the one where you are leaving your comment.
Benefit for user traffic: people will be drawn to your keyword rich anchor (more clicks) because you are linking to a post that discusses the same topic that the one they just read.
Benefit for search engine rankings: search engines will give more weight to your link because the “context” of the link will be optimal (the page you get the link from being optimised for your own keywords).
Step 3: Hunting down blog posts
If you are like me, you’ll only have between 100 and 150 blogs in your feed reader, but not all of them use CommentLuv. I believe that the actual number of CommentLuv enabled blogs is in the thousands, so you can see the potential traffic and number of links you could be missing out on. Simply head to your favourite search engine and type:
"'s last blog" intitle:"your_keywords"
with the speech marks, and you should find dozens, if not hundreds of new pages to acquire links from (no spamming though!). Once that’s done, you could do a -intitle to find other posts that could be suitable, but do not include your keywords in the title.
[TIP from Gail: You can also se the CommentLuv search engine to search for your interests and keywords.]
Benefits for user traffic: more potential visitors coming from more sources, plus the above benefits discussed in step 2.
Want proof this works? See Gail’s older post
Blog Traffic Up 54.87% in 30 Days – which went on to an increase of 76.63%
Benefits for search engine rankings: not only will you have the same SEO benefits than in step 2 (above) but your “blog links” graph will appear more natural because spreading over many more domains.
Step 4: Cycle through your links
Unfortunately, it is not always possible to find a link in your CommentLuv quiver that is relevant to the post you are commenting on. If that is the case, take the habit of cycling through the links that are available and select a different one for every comment you leave… even if they are on the same blog and especially if they are on the same blog post!
Benefit for user traffic: people who leave comments will be interested in different things, so while your post on PageRank might not interest them, another post on Twitter might (for example).
Benefits for search engine rankings: you gain more deep links to all your blog posts for a better chance of ranking for more competitive keywords. In addition, search engines might only count the first occurrence of a link on a page and discard any later ones. Repeating the same link (with identical anchor) more than once on a page won’t offer any SEO advantage.
Step 5: Slow down new blog post publications
This one will probably get some bashing from full-time bloggers, especially the ones who publish daily, but if you think about it, the more frequently you post, the less time you can rely on CommentLuv to gain links to your blog posts.
One post per day means that you only have 10 days to get links, while posting 3 times a week (still a high frequency, by all accounts) gives you almost a month’s worth of CommentLuv link building time.
Conclusion
CommentLuv is not only a great plugin to get people interested in what was recently published on your blog, but it will also help obtain keyword rich deep links that help your blog rank higher for its target keywords. By following these 5 easy steps you should see your website traffic soar to new heights and remember: always include your keywords in the blog post title for even better anchor text.
Leo is the co-founder of Accountant Websmiths, a specialist provider of websites for accountants in the UK. When he has some spare time he tweets (@netaccountant) and writes about web design, search engine optimisation, social media and blogging on his own blog.