Three ways to take what Google has given you and make the most out of it
Parents have been telling their kids for years not to post anything on the web that they wouldn’t want an employer to see. And drunken college photos and angsty teen blog rants may have been all they needed to worry about in the past, but there’s a new embarrassing identifier in town, and those are blog comments.
While unhappily embarrassing for college students, this update is great for business.. Until the spammers figure out how to ruin it, of course.
So, remember that time I told you that Google was paying special attention to Facebook? That, perhaps, there was this great Facebook hack that would get your articles boosted quickly and happily? And remember that time we told you that comments on your articles and even your landing pages did the same? Well, we were right.
But here’s more. Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google confirmed (via Twitter) that “Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments.” To break it down for you, those include Facebook comments as well as blog comments using third-party plugins like Disqus.
This all seemed to be brought to light by Amit Agarwal from Digital inspiration, who discovered a comment by Robert Scoble on TechCrunch, which was being indexed by Google and displayed in search results.
Even more, we also just told you about a plugin called Simple Facebook Connect that allows people to use their Facebook accounts to comment on your site. Although we already knew that they were being incorporated in some way, we now know that they’re also being indexed as well.
So let’s go. Three ways you can take advantage of this right now:
Tip #1: Dish out comments, and your articles, like it’s your job – because it is.
You know those small, hidden gem restaurants that you don’t even want to tell people about because you don’t want people crowding up your restaurant? Well the tip I’m about to get into is like one of those restaurants. I’d rather not share and prefer to keep it to myself, but in usual Mequoda fashion, it’s just too good to keep our mouths shut. This is, by far, my favorite SEO hack to date. It’s common-sense and simple, but very, very effective. Read Facebook SEO Tips: A Rank-Boosting Hack That We’d Really Like to Keep To Ourselves.
[text_ad]
Tip #2: Enable comments on landing pages.
We occasionally run organic marketing tests at the Mequoda Daily and enjoy sharing the results with our community. The latest test we ran has resulted in a 32% increase in overall net conversion rate on our rapid conversion landing pages, all thanks to a radical change to the template which included enabling comments. In May, we decided to change the format of the RCLPs and have the RCLP look and function much more like a post. Comments are now enabled, helping facilitate conversations about our free reports and encourage inbound links. Read: How We Increased Conversion Rate By More Than 30%.
Tip #3: Integrate Facebook into your blog and double your efforts.
What’s one way to make it perfectly effortless for the social-savvy users of the universe to comment on your blog? By making it Facebook-friendly of course! All cheesiness aside, this is just one strategy that news websites are beginning to use to jump on the social bandwagon, if it’s even considered a bandwagon anymore. There are several plugins for WordPress that allow people to comment on your blog using their Facebook profile, but not all of them are entirely beneficial to the business who’s publishing the content. This plugin has a 4/5 star rating, which isn’t bad for 136 reviews. Read: Integrate Facebook Into Your Blog with Simple Facebook Connect.
Do you have something more to share? Let’s discuss in the comments!
