If you’re reading this post, you likely are familiar with blog sites, posts, and the comments left on them. But are you familiar with the software that powers blogs? WordPress, Typepad, Moveable Type, are some of the platforms that drive the largest percentages of blogs on the Internet today. These blogging platforms, and most others have built in commenting capabilities, and why wouldn’t they? The very nature of blogging is basically a two part process: I’ll write and publish this post on our website, and you’ll read and (hopefully!) leave a comment telling the world how much you agree with what I’ve said

Or you’ll disagree with something I or one of the other commentors before you have said. And you’ll enter your comment into the built in form that comes with the blogging application. You then hit "submit" and depending upon how the site owner has things set up, your comment is shown on the site immediately, or just as soon as the administrator approves of your words.

What then is this new added feature known as "Commenting Systems"? If comments are already a part of the platform, why is there a growing number of website owners and administrators that are opting to replace the stock commenting functionality and using these third party commenting systems?

The quick answer is that these sites are hoping to increase readers interactions with blog authors as a result of the commenting systems "social community". Several of the leading commenting systems in the marketplace today are deployed to tens of thousands of websites. Features of the systems include allowing the viewer easy access to statistics of commenters including excerpts of comments they have left on other websites. Not only can a visitor receive more meta data on commentors, they may even choose to head to another site where that registered user has left comments.

And that little aspect is another big reason why many site owners like using commenting systems: they offer the promise of increasing a web site’s incoming traffic. But at the same time, the very mechanism that brings them in, takes visitors away just as quickly! 

So who are some of these commenting systems? Likely the top three: 

• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• SezWho

For the most part, the systems all work the same. In a nutshell, you read the blog post, and any comments that may have been left prior to your visit, and should you decide, a form that invites you to leave your own comments on the post and/or other comments. All systems are simple, straightforward, and if you have ever left a comment before, you’ll know how to use these new systems.

But what if you are a web site owner or administrator and you’re considering installing and using a commenting system? Should you take the plunge? Well, the first thing you might consider is reading the indepth evaluation on blog comment systems that Scott Jangro wrote up not too long ago. In his article, Scott goes into great detail about the various differences between the systems, and I highly recommend you add the article to your reading list.

Why might you not want to use a commenting system? Well, one of the early arguments agaist using them was the fact that you lost control (read ownership) of the actual data that made up the comments your visitors left on your site. Thankfully, the developers of theses systems, realized this and all have the options to both export and import the content data from and to your websites. Clearly making back ups of all your data is the smart move prior to trying any of these data movements, but I’ve only read a very small number of bad case scenarios concerning data corruption causing a loss of comments, so the numbers are very much on your side, and you’ll experience a high rate of success.

The only real reason you might not want to consider one of these systems is that you’ll be locking yourself into a proprietary system of commenting that won’t interact with any of the other commenting systems. To date, there is no universal system or standard that provides for interactivity between Intense Debate and Disqus. So, if you have decided on Disqus and want to get the attention of the thousands of Intense Debate users, you are pretty much out of luck. Of course you can employ other techniques to bring in traffic to your site, and you should do that regardless. Just realize that until standards are in place, comments whether hosted by your platforms built in system or a third party commenting system will all do pretty much the same thing. It’s just that the size of the commentor pool will definitely be larger. And that just might make it the smartest choice.

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There is no point in building links to your web pages unless you have already done your on site SEO first. In a very popular previous post we did we discussed the difference between an SEO personality and a Link Builder’s personality. An SEO typically focuses on optimizing the content ON the web site. (aka On Site SEO). That is what we are going to talk about today; best practices for On Site SEO.

Google describes SEO this way: Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your web site. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

Best Practices For On Site SEO

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
• What’s your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

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Since the advent and widespread adoption of broadband internet service, the number of videos viewed on the internet each day has swelled dramatically and is projected to continue growing at an extreme pace in the coming few years.  Statistics aside, this means that every day, various user-driven websites serve video content that is watched by millions of people around the world. 

To anyone familiar with internet marketing or SEO, this is obviously a huge potential marketplace to target so it’s no surprise that just about everyone is trying to cash in on the popularity of the various video marketing services these days (including the video sites themselves, with various monetization schemes).  This can take any number of forms, from video production and channel creation, all the way to PPC ads.  For the link builder, though, the benefit of these services is very clear:  Popular sites that accept and stream user video (YouTube, MSN, MySpace, Revver, etc…) are great places to acquire some links because they have plenty of authority and enormous amounts of traffic.

Obviously every video site is a little different, so there’s no single tactic, or set of link building strategies, that works to build links with all of them, but there are generally 3 places it can be done:

Each Video Page – The person who posts a video has a number of fields to work with, including a description field which can, and often does, contain a link back to the entity that the movie references.  As a link builder all you need is a user account and some sort of video to post and you can start inserting links.

User Profile Pages – Members of video sites are often given a place to create a profile page, much as they would do on a social network.  Nearly everything on that page is under the control of the user, so links upon links can be posted there.  Additionally, if you find another user who has relevant videos and profile information, you can certainly ask them for a link on their profile as well; you may have to give something in return, but usually a fair exchange can be had.

Video Comments – On many of the sites in question, there is an option to post comments about a video that has just been watched.  You’ll almost always be required to have an account before commenting, but if you plan to do video marketing of any type, you’ll already have one anyway.

Keep in mind that link building using video sites is a bit complex compared to some other sites, so care needs to be taken to ensure that the community and its administrators don’t ban your account.  The same could be said of many other social networking forums as well, so the principles of politeness and adding something that benefits the community apply equally to every video site.

As a final note on link building with videos, be warned that the NoFollow movement (which is equivalent to web fascism in the minds of most link builders, including this one) has gained quite a bit of steam as of late, and many of the links you can get on these media sites will have that tag attached.  That fact may make it seem relatively worthless to try for these links at all, but that’s simply not the case:  Think of online video outlets as a counterpart to social networks, and remember that brand exposure to a living, breathing audience is just as important as creating avenues for search engine crawlers.

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Marketing online for big or small websites can become daunting if you don’t randomize your approaches. A social marketing campaign, varied in its approaches, will give your client better results in achieving search engine domination. Using question and answer sites can prove to be beneficial if using them properly.

Trulia age Rank 5/10, Get answers to all your Real Estate questions.

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