Why leaving blog comments helps your SEO

One of the mysteries that I don't think a lot of people understand is that search engines seem to love blog comments, so much so that leaving blog comments can actually help your SEO efforts.

The reason that search engines love blog comments is that well, as I once described them, search engines are spider demons who are pretending to be human beings, who are experts in whatever terms and subjects that you punched into the query form.

And the way that the search engines do this is by weighing factors, such as the number of links there are to your webpage, and where it is coming from.

Think of each comment you leave (where you are allowed to place your website into the information field or leave one of your profile addresses) as a thread in a spider web. And if lots of people like the site that you commented on, the thread is thicker and heavier. You also have a heavier thread if your site and the site you are commenting on are actually about the same subject matter.

Basically, the little spider demons that are search engines count the number of times that the search term is found on your page (decide if it is a balanced number), and then factor in the weight of all the threads to your page to determine exactly where they are going to place your page in the search results.

So how do you use this demonic thought process to your advantage?

Be selective about what blogs that you comment on (unless you are doing a networking exercise like the commenting part of the UBC). Make sure that your site is related in the type of subject matter.

Try to write meaningful comments. If you can engage a blogger in a conversation, the little spiders notice and add more weight to their opinion of your threads.

Don't be afraid of linking to posts done by your favorite bloggers. In fact, linking to a post that you have commented on creates a double thread for the spiders to weigh.

The mysteries of SEO is simple once you start treating search engines as the demonic comment loving spiders that they really are.

Approaching my thousandth blog post on another blog

I have been blogging several years. I started out over at LiveJournal, and did some when Geocities still existed. I started blogging on Blogger in June 2007. (I also have an account with WordPress that I never used...but it doesn't count because I have only done a couple redircts posts there.)

This blog, Madcap Economics, is my tenth blog that I have set up on Blogger.

The other day, I was writing a post on my other blogs when I realized that I am approaching my thousandth published post there. The current post count (just published blogs, not the half finished drafts that I have started and abandoned in various stages) is 996.

(For the curious, the blog is called Gleamings from the Golden Dawn, and it is about Golden Dawn [an esoteric mystery tradition], Wicca, and the sharing of lots of cat pictures.)

This is one of my cats--I share lots of pictures of him.

Gleamings actually got started because I did not want to muddle the focus of my writing blog, Musings from the Inkwell...which has 488 published posts at the moment. So in the space of six years, I have written and published more than 1500 blog posts (I am too lazy to figure the exact total).

So what have I learned over the years of blogging. I have learned how to rapidly set up a blog. I have learned that the quickest way to find one's muse is to get royally upset about something that you have read on the internet. I have learned that Google AdSense works--but you really need a popular blog to benefit from it on a regular basis.

And I have learned that I will always come with another idea to blog about next week, no matter how much I think that I have exhausted all possible blog topics.

And here some of my readers were worried about coming up with 31 topics to blog about for the Ultimate Blog Challenge. Such silly people, they could always default to sharing 31 cat pictures (and I have done that in the past).