At this point in the brief history of the Internet, the blog format is familiar to most readers, clearly evidenced by the massive number of blog sites in existence. So in keeping with what is familiar, we have yet another blog post here, available for any user to read and then opine about if they desire. At the very least, there will be a decent number of people who end up reading this post and some of them may also decide to leave a comment. It’s likely that many of those comments will be written strictly for SEO purposes, as is extremely common these days. Since this is an SEO blog, we don’t take any offense to it, but we’d also like to spend a moment and share a few best practices to observe when building links with blog comments.

Obviously, blogs are popular for many reasons, but one of the major ones is that they allow a certain amount of reader/author interaction, which completely changes the way a writer can communicate with their audience. Strictly speaking, the commenting facilities were provided as a way for readers to give opinions and feedback to the author, but since they must rely on user input forms, it was only a matter of time before commenting became an SEO tactic. By itself, it’s not bad that people leave comments and include links in them, but the sheer volume of SEO-specific comments readily shows their widely variable quality range.

Currently, it would be surprising if anyone reading this blog didn’t know how to identify some of the lower quality SEO comments out there: One line generic responses with linked keywords for a name are very common, as are the ones that contain nothing but lines upon lines of links, sometimes all with foreign language anchors. Additionally, there are the ones that try to say something on topic, but leave a blatant and unrelated link below. There are a few other types of bad SEO comments around, but the ones just mentioned are as obvious about their real purpose as possible. Ultimately, that’s a very bad thing because no author who knows about commenting for SEO reasons would want those on their blog, period.So, the practice of blog commenting for link building must respect the following guidelines to be successful and to stick where they are posted:

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If you are not a beginner in website creation, management, or otherwise, then you know a thing or two about checking your backlinks. Taken advantage of Googles Webmaster Central?
Well if you have, then I’m sure you have wondered why you can’t view: all of your competitor’s backlinks, or all of your backlinks as a whole via the Google backlink operator.  Matt’s Cutts discusses in the video below what Google’s guidelines on the subject are, and details some more information about Link: Google’s backlink checker. Tell me if you are surprised Google has a lack of servers!?

Many users have been confused why every single backlink isn’t shown, and also why it seems those links are a mixture of nofollow and frankly some very crappy links. Matt explains that this is their randomization, and should not necessarily be seen as a ranking of which links are more important than others. While they use to follow that guideline, they no longer do. Matt suggests going to the aforementioned Google Webmaster Central, signing up, and getting a detailed list of your backlinks.

Why check your backlinks? Check out who’s linking to you, thank them personally, build your network, stay aware of your links, and make a goal to increase your overall awareness of your backlinks. Do damage control when needed, and stay in touch with who is saying what about your site. Check your competitions backlinks, while only a random subsample they can still serve as good information to glean from.

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Getting your website noticed is something that not only helps to create organic links, but gets more traffic to your site as well. Are you ready to ramp up your site and not only get it noticed but create brand recognition in your industry? Getting an article published can have a large impact on your brand.

Pretty much any industry can benefit from a well written article published on an online resource. Experts have always said that links from Library resource sites might just be the best links out there. While hard to get published on those sites, there are other places to get noticed and I’ve detailed some tips to getting noticed below. Best of all, most of the sites you end up finding to publish your article on are doing their own publicity, talking/e-mailing/IM’ing/commenting/tweeting about their new posts, and doing their own link building to your post: for free. If you have a blog and aren’t doing at least automated publicity, you really should–but that’s another subject for another post.

Do your research: find blogs with increased page rank, high Technorati scores, high Alexa scores, and subscribers. Search your keywords and see which ones show up, compare the results. The more you research, the better your results. Google’s Blogsearch is helpful when looking for a place to get published. Think about the types of blogs your demographic would frequent. Think also about journals, .org sites in your industry, and tip websites in your industry.

Network: connect and correspond with blog writers, website owners, authors, industry professionals, through friends and family. Utilize sites like Twitter and their search function, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other social networking sites. E-mail your contacts. Ask your connections to have a featured blog on their site, doesn’t hurt to ask just once right? Be willing to host a guest post as well on your own blog, and if not don’t get in the habit of asking others for favors, especially if they’re free.

Write: discuss a topic you have researched and are comfortable discussing. Determine whether or not you want your article to be witty, satirical, pessimistic, challenging, confrontational, informational, or a blend. The more practice you get at writing the better your articles will be. If you are struggling just remember: there is no harm in hiring a professional writer. After a few edits and revisions you are sure to come to an agreement on the outcome with the writer, but no doubt guidance will be needed as they are often not experts in every industry. Optimize your final draft with links to your site, utilizing separate keywords and URLs, and adding authority links.

Build links: utilize your social networks and friends to build links to your well written post, and publicize your piece after it’s been published.

Don’t forget to keep a list of all the contacts you build, and even after you have successfully published an article keep in contact with them. Check out the successes of one writer. You just might get published on CNN in the future too. The key thing to remember is: every little bit helps. Even if your first few tries are flops, don’t fret! There is always a professional offering advanced article marketing services….

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As an internet marketing company that specializes in offsite optimization, we are often confronted with clients that are struggling with their onsite SEO. Onsite SEO, meta tags in particular, have such an impact on what we do offsite, that we now offer website audits to our clients as part of our service offerings to help them with their onsite SEO. We also include the creation of meta tags for our content development service.

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