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Some people may ask if commenting on other blogs is actually important.  In a word: YES! Commenting will help increase your blog page rank and increase your blog traffic.  An increase in page rank will naturally increase your traffic because it means Google and other search engines have decided that your content is more relevant.  Thus, your blog will place higher in related searches:  meaning people will be more likely to click through to your pages and posts.  Commenting also places your links on the pages of the blogs you are commenting on.  Thus, more eyes will see your links and click over to your blog.

Size up the competition

A great way to get traffic to your blog is to comment on related, high page rank (Google PR), popular blogs.  You have a great blog, now it’s time to meet the competition and read what they have to say.  Just because a blog may be a competitor does not mean they can’t or won’t help you.

You can build your own reputation and increase your own traffic by linking to, quoting, and making comments on other related blogs.  By participating in the conversations, you become part of the community.  The web is becoming more and more a social occasion.  The more people feel some kind of connection with you, the more they will listen to you.  This will help you to quickly become regarded as an authority in your are of expertise (niche).  And, all this will get more people clicking on your links.  Bloggers love comments because readers who are engaged in a discussion in the comments section will return to the page again and again:  repeat traffic.

Also, don’t forget that there will be other readers that like reading the comments but don’t participate for whatever reason.  These “comment readers” can be interested in your comments and click through to your site to see what you’re all about.

A word of caution:  avoid “comment spam”.  Don’t place comments just for the sake of advertising.  It’s not ethical; please don’t do it.  Protect your reputation; that’s what we’re trying to build up, right!  Avoid placing comments that don’t relate to and enrich the conversation.  Bloggers appreciate good comments and may want to link to your site directly through a link exchange.  Now, you’ve made a friend that will consistently send traffic to your website.

As we’ve learned today already, keep in mind that we want these comments and links to be with sites that get more traffic than we do.  The more visitors that a site gets, the more visitors we could have coming from there to our site.

Tip of the Day

Comment on blogs that are relevant to you and also have a specific plugin installed – CommentLuv.  Yes, I recommend you to have it installed on your blog too.

• Once you publish a post on your blog, go to Google.com
• Perform a search using your keyword plus specific operators

For instance, if you are looking for blogs that talk about “health insurance”, then perform one of the following searches:

health insurance & “title=”CommentLuv Enabled”"

or

“Enable CommentLuv” + health insurance

How’s that for a simple and effective strategy.  If you follow this simple strategy for each blog post – your blog will begin to get at least 10 incoming links to EACH of your posts.  You will begin growing like wildfire.  Your authority will grow proportionally to your effort!

Congratulations.  Enjoy your more Authoritative blog!

Technorati Tags: Blog, blog comments, blog traffic, comment luv, Google, Google PR, keyword, PageRank, repeat traffic, technorati, Web search engine