Make your blog a Google magnet by increasing the number of comments made on your blog. Google and the other search engines put an undefinable, but considerable weight on comments you receive on the articles you write in your blog. If you want to move up in the search engine rankings, you must write quality content and get people to comment on your submissions.

Just ask yourself this question:

How can a robot determine whether an article is good or not?

* You would check article for originality - not scraped from someone else

* The use of keywords - is the usage natural or are the stuffed?

* Keyword density - is it in a reasonable range?

Did you use related keywords, or did you use the same ones over and over - Latent Semantic Indexing

* How the keywords relate to the title

* Many other characteristics of the article - Who knows?

* Finally, how many people comment on your articles

You should be striving to become an authority site. We want a site that has incoming links from other related high pagerank sites indicating that our site is trusted and recognized. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to getting recognition from the search engines. How can they tell your article is good? They look to see how many comments you are getting on the article.

The dream is to get a discussion going on your site. This is where people use your article as a vehicle to "argue", "debate", "dispute" and "discuss" the pros and cons of what you have written.

Here is a small list of things you can do to increase your number of comments:

* Make a controversial post - Take a strong position. Try to create controversy. Get them commenting by being somewhat outrageous

* Ask people to comment - The vast majority of people won't comment, but asking them to comment does help. Ask some questions at the end of your post that invite people to express themselves.

* Use Web 2.0 type promoting - Get your article out there. Post your article on several Web 2.0 sites like Digg, and Propeller for example. You don't have to be on all the sharing sites, but you will want to hit the influential ones, at least. Use an article submitting service such as SubmitYourArticle. You will find that it pays off pretty quickly. Your number of incoming, one-way links will increase over time.

Be a friendly person and freely post comments on articles that you like - Experienced bloggers really appreciate it when you make an intelligent, non-spam comment on their blog. Many blog owners will make it a point to search out your blog and comment on your work. Within Wordpress, the blog owner can simply click on the commenter's blog URL. It is pretty to reciprocate.

In summary: Comments on your articles are very important to you success. Treat them with respect. Engender them and you will see your rank improve.

Do you agree with the list above? What other ideas do you have? What have you found effective in increasing the number of comments your blog gets?