I won't hesitate pointing out even small factors that could potentially help your website's optimization with the search engines. A small tip that a lot of bloggers forget about is encouraging readers to comment on your posts. Why? Google absolutely loves updated content. I've seen this first hand. The bots come back "for more" when they see an active website. An active website to Google is considered multiple webpages being updated/added to (ie. Blog comments!). You see all over the the forums here how people stress upon unique content and filling your site up with useful copy. This is important. In fact, it's more important than the tip I'm giving now. However, why not do both so you can dominate your SERPs more quickly? . Encourage your visitors/readers to post their comments by posting about debatable topics. Since it depends on your industry, you'll have to do some thinking to see what people will respond to. Also, DON'T require registration in order for visitors to blog. You'll lose about 95% of the comments you're wanting simply because people hate registering. This alone will not get you to higher SERPs. This is an excellent way to get Google and other search engines to come back to your site more frequently, ultimately bringing you more traffic. Feel free to add to my reputation if you feel as if this may have helped you (top right of this post). Peace and love .
I have a blog that's lying around not updated for some 2 months already, yes no new post, no new comment/s, no auto pings but it's still regularly visited by meta crawlers... googlebot is very frequent.. a lot of hourly visits. I made an extensive RSS submission/s when it was set-up.. that helped a lot.
problem with not requiring registration when you have a high ranking blog is the spammers are out thick as flies.every day one of my sites has hundreds of the same crap in it .
This is a GREAT tip for bloggers. It's so simple yet so effective and unfortunately overlooked. I've also added a top commentors wordpress plugin to my blog which encourages comments (as the top 10 posters recieve do-follow links to their blogs and websites)
So far yes, I think it's very effective! Here is a link to it: http://www.pfadvice.com/wordpress-plugins/show-top-commentators/ I hope you find it successful on your blog