How to attract visitors to comment on your blog/site ?

Even before I lay out steps to get comments on your article, let me explain importance of comments for a site/blog. Comment means "a remark expressing an opinion or reaction". It indirectly implies visitors of your site has read your article and reacting on it by giving writing some phrase (feedback). It also means that your webpage bounce rate will stay low ! Bounce rate is determined by number of seconds/minutes a user is active on a webpage. It is inversely proportional to time spent. So, when user is writing comment it means, he/she is spending bit more time on your webpage. This implies your bounce rate is going down. Once your webpage bounce rate is low, it means your page will be better placed in google ranking.
Bounce rate is one factor which is effected by comments. There are other factors which make comments really special for SEO of a website. Some factors which are indirectly or directly effected by comments are as follows,

• Your writing skills (some commenters, comment on your writing skills). It is useful for you in long term as it will help you become a better article writer.
  
• Engagement of visitors and article writer. Through comments you will come to know some great people and then you can use the relationship further to improve your blog overall.
  
• Some comments encourage you to write more !
  
• Replying on comments shows you are open for discussion and ready to understand their point of view, which is really important for a article writer.
  

There are many factors like these, which are influenced by comments. You can add as many as you want by commenting (Err.. replying to this thread ;)). This tutorial is about, how do you get users/visitors to comment on your article or a webpage. Again prerequisite, for you to understand this tutorial fully, are that you should know html5, css3 and website template structure. Just follow simple steps mentioned below and you will see almost instant effect,

• Make comments section visible. Most blogs/sites don't keep comments section visible by default. It is a bad practice. Make sure you have a textbox visible for visitors to put there thoughts/comments.
  
• Ask Questions. I'm pretty sure whenever you write article you try to prove/show your point of view, right ? So, ask viewers if they agree with your point of view or they have other opinion on same subject. Make sure you ask open ended questions, which can lead to further discussion, rather than boolean type of question, for which answer is yes or no.
  
• Write in Engaging style. By engaging style I mean use some images, videos or questions and facts in your article. Visitors get engaged with images and videos easily.
  
• Customize message for comments link. Don't leave the default message above comments section. For example, if there are no comments then default comments link will show "no comments" as message. Now, you can change it to something like "Waiting for someone to put there thoughts" or "No comments yet, your opinion(s) are welcome". Noticed the difference ?
  
• Start bonding with commenters. You can do it by saying/replying thank you whenever user puts a comments and asking more details about his/her opinion. Another way is to redirect user to "Thank You" page whenever commenter comments on your blog/site. Make sure you don't do it everytime, otherwise it will be annoying. Do this redirection trick only when user visits your site for the first time or users visits first time in a day.
  
• Enable Subscribe to comments option. You can do it by installing a simple plugin, subscribe to comment. It will help users to subscribe to comments as well. And whenever users sees an interesting comments related to him/her, he/she will come back to to your site to reply or comment ! Similar to enabling subscription, whenever you post, in this forum.
  

This is not exhaustive list of tricks to get comments. By this I mean, you can always add more points to it by replying to this thread. The tricks I've mentioned here are mostly related to comment section. You can get comments by posting something really weird, but it comes under getting comments by content. But that was not the objective of this tutorial. The objective of this tutorial is to attract commenters for any topic/article on blog. I hope the tricks I mentioned were useful and will help you in getting more comments.

p.s. Did you noticed I wrote this tutorial in engaging manner ? This is what I was pointing to when I said write engaging articles. ;)