Encourage the Right Kind of Comments

While you're filtering comment spam with word verification and moderation tools, you should also be encouraging readers to post relevant, constructive comments on your blog. The right kind of blog comments are valuable in a number of ways:

• Each new comment increases the chance of another comment, as other visitors read and react to it. Ideally you'll end up with a full-blown discussion on your hands, with your comments section ending up longer than the original post!


• Readers find comments interesting and will keep coming back to your blog to read them. Thus, they make your blog more "sticky", in the parlance of web design.


• You readers may know more about a particular topic than you do, so you're likely to learn a thing or two from their comments. You may even get an idea for a future blog post from comments left in a previous one.


• The more good, on-topic content you blog has, the more search engines will like it. This makes relevant comments a highly cost-effective (aka, free) search optimization tool. All those new keywords and phrases help improve your search rankings and get your blog listed for more search queries.

A simple way to encourage relevant comments is to include a brief invitation at the end of each blog post. Something like, "Got experiences about topic ____ you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below!"

You can also write blog posts specifically designed to attract comments - use a provocative question as the title, or make an opinionated statement that readers just can't stop themselves from commenting on.

So...got any ideas about blog comments you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below! :-)