Setting up your professional website publishing your message to the world is an important step in your business plan, but it’s only a beginning. Once you have your site up and running, with pages on your business products, updates, and offers, and you’ve got it supplemented with a great business blog and original content, you’ll face the ongoing challenge of keeping that content fresh.
Fresh content – content that is new, on a website where the pages are kept up-to-date and the blog is maintained regularly – is vital to securing and keeping good SEO ratings, and search engines reward sites that are updated more frequently.
User-Generated Comments for Websites
This is where comments and user-generated content comes in. Comments, for websites, are like a transfusion – they add new content, directly from your audience. The direct nature of user comments ensures their relevance, while the relevance, and the immediate nature of comments, ensures a direct benefit to your site’s SEO. Generating comments for websites is a win-win situation. A good example comes to us from the Washington Post newspaper, which recently adopted a flexible, open source comment platform. The Post installed a comment platform that was lightweight, so it would not impede site loading, and offered strong moderation for the online debate.
Finding the Best Platform to Host Comments for Websites
Finding the right platform to host your site’s comments is essential. Most website and blog platforms come with “native” comment platforms, but the functionality of those platforms can be limited, and usually permits just plain text or simple photo uploads. In today’s digital world, online audio and video streaming, that is simply not enough.
The best comment platforms will permit rich media uploads, as well as plain text. This can include images, but also audio or video content. The rewards of rich media commenting are tangible.A highly active comment section is more likely to attract positive search engine attention, improving site SEO, and a site with better SEO is more visible to potential customers. Site users are more likely to engage in the comment section, leading to increased debate and discussion, and engaged site users are more likely to convert and become customers. Now that we know the advantages to look for, let’s take a look at some of the features strong commenting platforms offer.
What to Look for in Comment Platforms
One of the best things about comments for websites is that they can encourage discussion and other site user engagement. In this line, a good comment platform will allow you to moderate and curate the comments, to prevent spam and abuse, while permitting future site users to follow a comment thread. A related feature is permission for users to reply directly to comments, further animating the discussion.
We have already mentioned the importance of rich media for promoting audience engagement; equally important is social sharing for your comments. By their nature, comment platforms are tools to promote conversation on a website, an inherently social action. It only makes sense to share those comments to popular social media platforms. In addition, social media sharing will positively impact on your site’s SEO ranking.
Heyoya Brings you All the Advantages
A voice comments platform, Heyoya also brings other rich media to online commenting, and is proven to increase user engagement. The platform is easy to install on any site or blog, and will immediately permit your audience to comment with plain text, images, voice clips, or any combination of them. The platform includes options for social media sharing and moderation, and there are options for platform customization.
Heyoya is a game-changing comments platform bringing voice to online publishers, improving user engagement and SEO by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya installs directly on the backend of your website as a plugin. With voice and rich media, you’ll open your website to a larger audience. Join Heyoya today and grow your community.
For more information on Heyoya, click here.
