Here is a list of must reads on building backlinks with blog commenting:
Blogs that Follow
…The earliest initiator of the campaign is traced to Randa Clay who on her blog posted the now popular “U Comment, I Follow” design free for all to copy and place on their own blogs as long as the blog advocates Do Follow as well…
Do Follow Blogs - How to Find Them?
…Finding a blog to comment upon is a challenge and finding a blog with dofollow enabled is even more challenging. But we all know that the benefits of the dofollow right? So, it’s time worth spends simply because comments that you left at dofollow blogs count towards your blog PR…
The Ultimate Do-Follow Link Building Guide
…This post will help explain how to locate these DoFollow blogs and how to contribute a meaningful and successful comment. Doing this properly can land you high quality backlinks, while contributing to quality of the conversations across the web…
Jason Morrison on Blog Spamming
…Spam, it’s not just for breakfast and email anymore. Webspam is a huge problem - if you run a blog or a forum, you’re probably familiar with the gobs and gobs of gibberish being posted all over the web by spammers…
And here is a list of Do Follow Blogs
Link building is a very important aspect of SEO, but also a part that is not much enjoyed by webmasters. However, it is all not that difficult as it seems. Simple links can be received through directory submissions and article submissions, which can both be outsourced to manual submissions services.
The more custom work of link building is actually quite fun. It does not really consist of link exchange anymore. You do not need to go around all the sites in your niche to beg for a link exchange and trying to be the one that got the ‘better deal’. Link building is now all about joining communities and conversations.
Here are the top 10 fun link building tips.
- Check out the backlinks of your competition. Use Yahoo to search for their domain name and a link:competitordomain.com to see all sites that are linking to the competition. Is there any chance that you can get links from these same places? Or do even better?
- Find blogs in your niche where you can leave your links trough comments.
- If you’re in the business of selling things online, try sending some free stuff to bloggers for them to review. Require a link.
- Join forums in your niche and add a link in your signature. Post genuine answers to questions and ask real questions. It is not only about getting backlinks, but also your reputation as expert on the subject.
- If you like a product or service, write a testimonial with a link to your site in it and email it to the seller of the product or service.
- Upload the pictures you use in your site to Flickr and add deeplinks to the description area.
- Be the very first to notice something going on. This works especially great for smaller niches or local sites. Publish news in a niche industry and make comments about it on blogs, forums etc. That might make other people making comments about it after you link to your site.
- Be a guest poster. Write for blogs and magazines. Rather then starting your own blog, building it up, etc. many blogs that are already quite well established, will accept guest posts.
- If you’re in a retail business, try asking your provider for some links on their sites.
- Try to get into Wikipedia. This does require good content and gives you a no follow link. But many people copy content from Wikipedia and leave the links.
Commenting on blogs is a good traffic generation strategy, depending on the traffic the blog gets. You will gain traffic and readers that way, and it is easy as well as free. It is also a way to build your links and eventually you could get better rankings in search engines. But that was not the idea behind blog comments.
Commenting on blogs is for people that are passionate about a topic and want to respond to the post of the blogger. By commenting regularly on blogs, you become part of the community. People will then see you as an important figure in the field and check out your brand/product/company. It is all about becoming part of that community. Not to mention the reputation you build for yourself by participating in comments.
Commenting on blogs takes time. It is not a one-two-three job of databases with blogs sorted by PR and topic, opening and typing a little “Great Post” in the comment box. Find a few blogs that interest you, read them regularly (or subscribe to them) and post something every few days. If you do this on a couple of blogs, you can build hundreds of links every month.
When commenting, keep in mind:
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Comments from No Follow blogs have value as well. Not only search for do follow blogs that can pass on link juice, but look for direct traffic as well.
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Become a regular poster in the same blogs. Chances are that you become an known figure in the community and receive more traffic from that blog. Also, some blogs give fixed links to commenter with most comments in that month. This brings in another free link.
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Do not add any links in the comment body, unless your comment really can’t do without that link. Linking to your own blog is SPAM and these comments are often filtered and automatically deleted.
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Add your name in the Name field, or a short handle. Do not add a whole key phrase as anchor text.
Blog commenting is a very effective way of getting exposure and backlinks, but if it is going to be abused as reciprocal link exchanging and buying links, it will soon be dead. Either the blog owners will switch to nofollow links, or the search engines will place less importance on links in blog comments. Let’s not abuse it.
Link building is oh so important in SEO. Experts are becoming more and more creative in finding ways to get those links. And discussions are rising in forums on which links are best, which links might get your site penalized, which links are quick, and how much is each link worth translated in dollars.
The answer to all these questions can be given very simple; you don’t just need lots of them, the best, the most expensive. You need all of them!
Here is what you should NOT do while going out to get those links:
- Do not forget to check your internal links. All webmasters know that links are important. Some work hard to get those links, some focus on quantity, some on quality, but many fail to check their internal links. Internal links are the most important links on a site and what is more? You have them in control! Check if you used relevant anchor texts and positioning of those links.
- Do not forget to get some low PR links. Because everyone is looking for the quick fix and tries to get links from high PR sites, many webmasters forget to look on a long term basis. Those PR0 sites are very easy to give a link to you, and some of them will the PR4 and PR5 sites in the future. Besides that there are two more reasons to get the low PR links as well: PR0 is not nothing, it all counts. And it is more natural to have incoming links from all kind of PR sites.
- Do not forget your outgoing links. Don’t worry about PR juice leaking away. You can see it in two ways: each good article or statement shows the source of the information. And if you want to get something, you need to give something.
- Do not forget to monitor your inbound links. If you have done a links exchange, content exchange or bought a link or won a link, check regularly if it is still in place and if it is a real do follow link. When you have done a trade, don’t forget about it as soon as it is put up. Monitor your link partners.
- Do not use useless anchor texts. If you have the opportunity to choose an anchor text, use a relevant keyword for it. It is a big failure to just choose your URL or company name as anchor text. It is very likely that nobody is searching for that. Find out your keywords under which you want to rank and choose that as an anchor text where possible.
- Do not leave paid linking marks. Even though paid linking is not recommended, it still works in many cases and the temptation will always be there. Just make sure that you do not leave big marks behind that are easy to track. Do not make it too obvious that you are paying for links.
- Do not forget to check the relevance of a link. There is not much point in receiving links from totally unrelated websites. Try to focus on sites with a related or similar topic to get your links from. And get some real links from that site, not somewhere from the 20th page of their link exchange program. PR isn’t everything, relevance and positioning are.
- Do not add ‘no follow’ to your outgoing links. Just as you expect a genuine link to your site, you should give genuine links as well. PR juice is really not leaking to anywhere if your links are genuine. Only pages that consist of links only and are irrelevant to other pages will lose their PR very quickly, but this has nothing to do with a leak.
Link building is a very time consuming and frustrating job. Remember: nobody really likes it. You send out 100 emails, fill in tons of forms and receive only a handful of links back. That is the way it is, but if done right, it is totally worth it. Good links will last a long time.
What does an SEO company really do? Isn’t optimizing my site just fixing the meta tags? No, SEO has become a complex and ongoing process and quick fixes as adjusting the meta tags do not longer exist.
- An SEO expert analyses your website. In order to do an effective job, he needs to really understand your website, know how it is structured and what the important webpages are. The expert needs to get a clear picture of the site as a whole.
- A good SEO company will conduct a keyword analysis to find the most relevant keywords for the website, to see which keywords are searched for and could drive targeted traffic. Also competitiveness should be analyzed. There are some less competitive keywords that still drive a lot of traffic, but could be easier to optimize for.
- Then the SEO expert will check the rankings of the website under the targeted keywords found in the previous analysis. This is to see where the site is ranking well and where not, so that the expert can see which areas need more attention then others.
- The websites that are currently in the top positions of the targeted keyword searches should then be checked out; what is their structure, title, number and quality of backlinks, etc. In other words, finding out how they got to that top ranking.
- The expert will have a look at the most important landing pages of your site and evaluate the content of it. Factors as keyword density and keyword prominence are included in the evaluation. Pages might have to be re-written.
- An SEO company also looks at the coding of the site. Search Engines see the website from a totally different point of view than the visitors, but this should be synchronized as much as possible.
- Before barging on a course of changes, the SEO expert will have to give an overview of his findings and make recommendations to optimize page elements, coding, meta tags, etc. This way it can be established that the SEO is working in the right direction and following the objectives of the client.
- Internal and External link structure are a major factor in the search engine’s algorithms. The SEO expert will examine your internal linking and start an external link building campaign with creative ways to build highly relevant incoming links.
An SEO expert will regularly track results of the implemented strategies, update the ranking reports, reflect on them and if necessary make new recommendations. It is also the task of an SEO expert to keep up to date on search engine rule changes and competitive site rank changes and respond to that.
SEO is an ongoing process and has most benefits if handled as a whole. Your SEO expert should have a good insight in all the factors and changes involved and implement strategies accordingly.