In this age of content creation, having comments on your blog or site is a mandatory requirement. Since we are talking about blogging, you, as an avid reader, on the web would know that WordPress is the choice of many when it comes to choosing a CMS. Having said that, there are many other options out there as well like Wix, Ghost, and Weebly.
To put some numbers here — 74,652,825 sites out there are depending on WordPress. That’s one site per person in Turkey. Around 50% (close to 37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com. In the realm of self-hosted sites, WordPress accounts for 18.9% of all websites.
Firstly, choosing the right commenting system is mandatory when it comes to your blog. Adding Comments to WordPress.com with Hyvor Talk is a great instructive guide to do just this. Now, comments at the end of the day are content, and when you make the decision to enable comments, it only serves to create more content. Yet this is more than just creating more comments.
There’s a reason why interaction wins: All of us communicating together are better than one. There is a great deal of advantages in creating your own circle and integrating a commenting system. If you’re selling a service or product integrating a commenting system to encourage comments is not only about pursuing your site with interactions. It’s mainly about selling your service or product.
The content on your blog should be credible and authoritative. This would encourage people to interact and form a community. Of course, it is assured of getting your ranking up as well when your comment section is plugged with a lot of keywords that you’re optimizing for.
But before thinking that you can get your blog comment section populated with comments, remember that through updates like Panda and Penguin, Google ensured that irrelevant comment backlinks were useless to the websites they went to. Since one page could contain hundreds of different links to other websites, each link was passing very little link juice. Now, strategic, highly-relevant and high-authority backlinks are much better than hundreds of backlinks from irrelevant sources.
As you probably would know, there are two types of blog comments; ones which are known as gated and ones which are known as non-gated. Gated comment sections require users to give the website some information before they can post a comment. This is the current modus operandi since spam and trolling can be limited. One of the main issues publications or bloggers have with allowing comments is the issue with toxic commentary and harassment.
The correct degree of interactions and hits are very important for SEO purposes. Many credible sources state that blogging is not just about publishing content, but also about the two-way communication and community building aspect. Commenting is another tool in the arsenal of creating the right degree of engagement and social proof for your blog.
