Comments – SEO or Engagement

Back when I first started blogging, I would check out a couple of sites that promised to let me know how to get thousands of people visiting my website. I would go to conferences and other workshops and the like. The goal, so I thought, was to get lots of lots of people coming to my blog and commenting and engaging and, eventually, a few of them would want to pay me for my services.

I would hear all sorts of stories about this blogger or that was making who was tons of money and getting loads of business from people who read their blog.

Wow!  How does that happen?

SEO?

One of the strategies I had heard worked best was to go around to other people’s blogs or to Internet forums and leave a comment. Of course, this meant I had to read a lot of blogs. After all, we’ve all see the comment spam:

Great blog. I’m bookmarking this site. Keep up the excellent writing.

I didn’t want my comment booted off the blog or out of the forum so I dutifully read…and read…and read. And then I commented. I left behind my real name and my real URL so that other blog readers, enthralled with the depth and insight of my comments, would visit my site.

I also thought, wrongly, that leaving my URL at all those blogs and forums would create tons and tons of backlinks which, I was told, is another way to get great SEO.

Or Engagement?

I’ve come to realize that commenting all over the place doesn’t really get me the juice I thought it would. Oh, I’m sure someone sees my comments and clicks over to my blog but my guess is that their in places where they couldn’t use my services anyway. That’s the challenge with writing a real estate blog.  It’s location specific. I’m not selling houses in California.

So, comments seem to be about engagement. Or, put another way, being social.

I’m always surprised when I see someone’s personal blog about their personal trials and tribulations or how cute their kids are have 150 comments on their posts. Maybe that’s what interests people enough to come out from the shadows and actually comment.

Old Posts Never Die…

Of course, there are always a few comments scattered around social media. If some shares a link to a particular post or if I add it to my Facebook page, I might get some engagement there but it’s harder to follow.

Mike Mueller wrote about commenting awhile back and he had some good points.

Occasionally, Google will pick up on a headline of some or the keywords in your blog post and get people commenting, sometimes years (yes, years!) after the blog post was written. That’s always fun. It seems that year was 2010 for me. I wrote a blog post on mortgage underwriting that got people’s juices flowing and people continue to post to it today.  Then I recently got a “take off our link” e-mail from a company whose link I slipped into a post in 2010. The blog post wasn’t even about them. It was a friendly link. Go figure.

So, I’ve kinda resigned myself to commenting as engagement. Rarely does discussion ensue. Usually, it’s a one off until the next blog post. I guess people reserve their sociability for social media.

I’m interested in how others see commenting on blogs. Do you just read and run or is there anything that would cause you to actually start typing? Is it good SEO or just good fun?