Blog commenting is indeed a good way to build inbound links and reputation over a period of time. Blog Commenting is most effective when you leave your links at high PageRank blogs. Blog commenting is a wonderful way to start developing relationships with others. Indeed this might be very helpful if you use blog commenting for link building a practice which is quite popular it seems. Think of blog commenting as an extension of forum participation, without the exclusivity of a forum. The best part of blog commenting is that you can establish yourself as an authority in the topic and this adds up to your online reputation.

Commenting

What a lot of people tend to forget, however, is that there are best practices for everything, including blog commenting. I actually argue that most people go about a blog commenting strategy the wrong way and there is a higher leverage technique that most blogger don’t do, but even if you follow the basic advice and just get out there and be a prolific commenter it will build traffic, and here’s proof. But seriously I have found commenting on other blogs to be one of my best sources of traffic, because then they feel like they need to comment my blog.

Link

It is one way to use blogs to help boost your blog or web site and build back links legitimately. One acceptable use of posting links in your comments is if you are point to another content resource that adds to the conversation such as a rebuttal piece or complimentary piece or other relevant content that isn’t clearly seen as selfish promotion.

If the majority of your comments are obvious hit and run comments to gain backlinks or to get into the Top Commentators list, you’re not painting a good picture of yourself. The more backlinks counted by Yahoo also results in added recognition beyond SEO and can also bring monetary value to your website. Blog comment links are good, but they should be mixed and matched with other types of one way links.

Traffic

Some people leave comments on other blogs hoping to get noticed and possibly gain more traffic. You might wonder though, does commenting actually work to drive traffic today in the more crowded blogosphere. This seems to bring some of the best targeted traffic that stays around the longest. Commenting has always seemed to help me gain a little extra traffic. Not only am I getting traffic from the blogs that I’m posting on, but I am also getting traffic from the search engines that pick up on my comments on other blogs.

Marketing

I’ve always been an advocate for active blog commenting playing an important role in the online marketing mix for a massive amount of reasons, even beyond SEO. Posting on blogs has been a very powerful form of marketing for me. Of course, blogs are also great for a more conversational and authentic forms of marketing because today people filter out, reject, or mistrust traditional advertising and marketing methods.

I do have a distinct strategy when it comes to blog commenting and I plan to start putting up post about it soon once I have refined it. Automatic blog commenting does not show the professionalism that a person wanting to build a high-quality readership. Funny how I never thought about blog commenting as a valid source of links considering the no follow attribute, but despite the no follow, I must admit blog comments does produce click through traffic from a very targeted group of piers (a PR 7 or 8 link never hurt anybody) to boot. Do I think blog commenting is all about attention grabbing, not all about it, but there is a certain aspect to this that you do want to achieve? And commenting on other blogs is definitely part of that Social Networking you should be doing. “The most important function of blog commenting is to gain new high-quality readership “.