SEO Tactic… foment the debate!

Extending Your Presence Online — How Intense Debate Comments Helps SEO

“He Parlayed his Way to a Million Dollars” – unknown

As I’ve said before, Publishing is the new Marketing, and Marketing via Content now offers continuing new ways to extend your reach and engagement prospects. But you have to foment — that is, promote the growth and development of  your comments, so you can “parlay” your way toward business objectives. One way to do this is with “Intense Debate” — a WordPress plugin that also helps you with SEO.

What is “Intense Debate”? It’s a plugin for WordPress that makes commenting easier to manage and extends your potential reach by allowing your blog readers to choose to tweet their comments. IntenseDebate.com is owned and managed by the same folks that are behind WordPress.com (the remote hosted blogging platform used by millions) and WordPress.org (the software used to create your own hosted CMS and business blog solutions) — Automattic.com.  The company also enables Blogger, Tublr. and TypePad integration.  Features include Comment Threading, Reply by Email, Reputation points and Comment Voting, and Twitter integration — your commenters have the option to send a simultaneous tweet when they post a comment.  Add to that the opening up of the plugin’s API to developers, and I think there’s even more potential to plumb here.  Try it by leaving a comment below.

Above – the Intense Debate comments template allows your commenters to login with Social Networking IDs, Subscribe to comments, and also to post comments on Twitter.

How does Comment Debate help you in SEO? The system provides a very clean, rankable set of Comments on your site, plus gives each commenter the option to tweet their comments when they post them — with links back to your site.

Above, you can manage the comments from more than one blog — all in the same place.

How does Comment Debate help you in Business?

• As stated at Intense Debate — the system serves to bring “quality comments to the forefront”.  And “forefront” translates to engagement with just the right sort of thinkers and prospects for your brand.
• Save Administration Time: Once you have an Intense Debate account, you can quickly manage the comments from multiple blogs all from one control panel online.
• Synergy Loop:  You comment on a post(s) at other sites related to your business mission, and this gets automatically tweeted on Twitter, whereby like-minded people may visit your business blog, comment and have their comments then appear on Twitter with links back to your blog.

Can my business stand up in an “intense” debate? Of course.  This is like asking if your sales force will be able to handle discussion, and even criticism at a trade show.  They can, can’t they?  Good companies will always embrace engaging the market because the constructive criticism will help them perfect products and services.  And great sales people know that debate is an opportunity to present your position which leads to more sales.  Plus, you can always moderate your comment system to weed out spam and destructive comments.

Recommendation: Install IntenseDebate (the WordPress plugin is freely distributed) and add your business blog to the debate.  Webfadds will be pleased to provide this service for you — we’ll be adding it as an option for our Social Marketing Solutions (just contact us at that page).