Commenting on blogs similar to yours is one quick way to promote your own blog/website. I discovered this a while back but wanted to beef up a bit my own blog before jumping on the “comment on other blogs” wagon.

Although a lot of them are very well designed I found it hard to write about some mistakes I kept on seeing on other blogs. In fact I have learned a lot.

The most important thing to remember is this:

Scan not read

People do not have the time to read a whole lot now-a-days (unless they are really interested in a particular subject) so “Good bye Reading” and “Hello Scanning”. In order to capture attention you have to create breaks in your text such that the human eye can easily scan, stop and read small bits.

This can be accomplished by using colors, bold fonts or a combination of the two.

Here’s an example of bad text on a blog:

Bad Blog Structure

Now here’s something I would scan rapidly and read portions of it (if not the entire post). Notice the titles, bullets and other breaks in the text.

Good Blog Structure

If I made it a goal to comment on several blogs each day, this approach will save me time and rapidly move onto the next one. In the same time I retain some good information because the major points in the blog captured my attention.

Sometimes even a picture comes in very handy by tickling the viewer’s curiosity so use them in your blog. Don’t just copy some image from Bing or Google images. Besides being copyrighted, you won’t get brownie points on originality either.

So, bloggers out there – make your readers’ life easier and incorporate these tricks into the flow of your post:

• Write posts that are 500 words or less (this is just under 360 words)
• Break the post in several chunks of text (each chunk consisting of 3-4 sentences)
• Emphasize titles, important ideas or key elements in your text for easy reading
• Do use bulleted lists (just like here)
• Ask questions and spark interest such that comments are welcomed
• Draw conclusions at the end of the post

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First of all – familiarize yourself with basic SEO jargon like: internal/external links, meta tags, titles, pagerank, etc. 

This way at least you know what the SEO company is talking about when they make the sales pitch.

Personally, I noticed that the shady ones are often hiding behind geek lingo trying to paint you in a corner by throwing these words at you, thus proving that they know what they are talking about.

You can cut that conversation short and find out how credible and professional they are by asking 5 little questions. Here they are:

1. What kind of results should you be able to see and how long will it take to get there?
2. What experience do you have in my industry and how long have you been doing this?
3. Show/send me examples of your previous work and success stories. Can I contact some of these people?
4. Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
5. What other marketing services do you offer besides SEO?

Just keep this list by your phone and take notes while they answer these questions. I’m sure you are a pretty seasoned business individual so you should be able to spot the shady ones right away. You can download a quick and easy PDF document of “Questions to ask a SEO company” right here.