SEO tips for content optimization: Do comments affect your articles’ SEO?

UPDATE: eHow comments are now indexed separately from your articles. So now the content that affects your article’s SEO the most on eHow (besides your article) is the Related Articles section and the titles of your last five articles, which are included with every article you write. This is a good reason to create separate IDs for each of your niches and choose related articles based on title keywords. Remember, you can’t go back and edit these on eHow after you save your draft or publish.

No matter which content venue you publish on, it’s always a good idea to paste your article’s URL into Google’s AdWords External Keywords tool to see what Google thinks your article is about, and use SEO Quake’s Density Analysis (Firefox toolbar) for a comprehensive view of your content optimization that may surprise you.
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You constantly work to optimize your articles when writing online for content sites, so maybe you’ve wondered whether comments on your articles affect their SEO (search engine optimization). You’re writing articles online to make money online—ideally to earn long-term residual income. And you want to increase traffic to your online articles, because you make more money when your articles get more traffic.

It makes sense, right?

Well, you may not realize this, but ALL of the content on the page where your article is published affects your articles’ SEO. And any content that you didn’t add to the page with your specific keywords in mind has the potential to lower your article’s search engine rankings.

When you write articles for web content sites, your article is only one small piece of the page.

There are links to ads, related articles, non-related articles that you may have written—all content that you may have little or no control over. And although it is generally near the bottom of the page after your article, which makes it a bit less significant in terms of SEO, the comment section is almost always completely out of your control. (Unless you are in the habit of commenting on your own articles.)

Though you may not have given it much thought before, you should account for comments in your article optimization strategy to ensure strong search engine rankings and maximum profit potential for your online content.

High search engine rankings mean that your article is listed as one of the first that searchers see in their search engine results page. And for each place that your article drops in its search engine rankings, clicks on that article will drop exponentially, reducing its residual income potential.

So how can you improve content optimization, or article SEO, when you cannot control all of the content on the page? That’s easy—sort of—until it comes to accounting for comments. The reason that comments make article SEO more difficult is that they are the one page variable (other than ad placement and relevance), that is most likely to change over time. And you cannot control that change.

To optimize articles written for content sites such as InfoBarrel, HubPages, or eHow, you need to first evaluate the page variables. That is, all of the content on the page, and not just your article’s text. This includes: related articles listed by the site, related articles listed by you, categories, even your user ID and bio, in some cases. The search engine spiders watch this, so you should, too.

Of course you want to ensure that your ads on the page relate well to your article’s keywords. Ideally, that will follow naturally over time when you effectively research and apply relevant and profitable keywords to your articles.

To find out whether comments are helping, hurting, or not affecting your articles in the search engine rankings, you can do a bit of sleuthing with online SEO tools. The first tool to use is Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. Enter the URL of your article into the address window that appears when you click the radio button on the left labeled, “website content.”

Google will then return a list of keywords (in blue, just below where you typed your article URL) that it determines are related to your article. It also lists those keywords and keywords related to those keywords down the page. You should get a good sense from this exercise as to whether or not Google understands the topic of your article.

Next, visit this great SEO tool and enter your article’s URL under “Page URL:” If you are writing online and have never tried analyzing article keywords with a tool like this before, you’re in for a surprise. If you happen to have any eHow articles to analyze, especially ones with lots of comments, start with one of those. Spend some time reviewing all the data that this tool crunches for you.

You might even want to do that now in a new tab or window, then read the rest of this post.

Surprised? I’ll bet you never thought of other people’s user IDs as keywords before, did you? How do you feel when you realize that this tool, which mimics a search engine spider, thinks the phrase, “Great info. 5*!!!” is one of your article’s top keyword phrases? Now imagine what that is doing to your article optimization efforts. Does it make you want to go “friend” a bunch of other users and ask them to comment on your articles?

Look at it this way. Those users can’t help you anyway, unless they link to your articles from their articles, blogs, or websites. They can’t click on your ads without landing you in hot water, because that could be viewed as click fraud. And if they comment on your “Dog Sweaters” article saying, “Great dog sweater ideas. I love pet sweaters. Dog sweaters are wonderful,” you could end up with something that looks like keyword stuffing, meaning the search engines will think you are gaming them and penalize your article. So think twice about that.

That said, here’s the flip side of whether comments hurt or help your articles’ SEO: If you tend to write in a specific niche about a potentially controversial topic, or a topic that garners dozens of questions and comments every time you post, then THIS is when comments can come in handy. Because if your articles begin to draw a true following of readers, especially readers who are not necessarily writers on the same content site and who subscribe to and add backlinks to your articles, that traffic can build on itself, thereby increasing your search engine ranking.

And when those readers start linking to your articles, and then their readers and the search engines follow those links, you’ve got viral marketing for your articles that will increase your web traffic like nothing you could have achieved all by yourself.

But whether you decide that you want comments or don’t want comments, you will get them. Your article will catch someone’s eye, and they will comment with something completely spammy, unrelated, or over-the-top keyworded, and then what?

Then you review your article again to determine whether you need to edit it to adjust your keyword ratio or not. And don’t worry. Editing your article can actually help it. There is an upcoming ebook about article SEO that teaches you how edit keywords effectively. I got a sneak peek, and I highly recommend it. I promise to tell you as soon as it’s released how and where you can get it for yourself.

Here is how you can decide whether your article’s comments have skewed its keyword ratio enough that you need to edit it:

1. Check the ads on your article’s page. Are they relevant? Are they the ads you were hoping for? If yes, leave well enough alone. If not, edit your article.
2. Look at your article’s URL in Google’s AdWords Tool again. Does Google still get it?
3. Use the SEO Workers’ Tool again to evaluate your article and determine whether and how much your keyword ratio has changed, and adjust accordingly, if needed.

It is a good idea to crunch the data (I know. How obvious was that phrase?), using several methods for a big-picture sense of how your article is doing. If your analysis still shows relevant keywords, and the article is earning a good residual income for you, then don’t mess with success. And if you decide you don’t want comments on your new articles, try creating a new user ID and staying under the social radar to find out for yourself whether article comments hurt or help your content optimization goals for your articles’ best SEO.