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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Back in March 2008, we posted a great little article called "10 Good Links You Can Get in the Next 50 Minutes".  By popular demand, we have researched additional resources for garnering great link juice for your website, and came up with the highly creative title, "Ten (More) Links You Can Get Right Now."  Personally, I voted for “Ten Links Strikes Back,” but that’s a whole different story.  As you know, it is imperative to keep up on your link building efforts, and we understand how difficult it can be trying to generate new and different links that will register well with the search engines. We hope you’ll find these ten resources as useful as we did.

Two social networking sites you should join right now. – Facebook and LinkedIn are the social networks in vogue at the moment, especially in the business world.  There are plenty of ways to get noticed and to make connections with other people on both sites, without much spam or the overwhelmingly adolescent element that plagues MySpace.  Both networks allow links back to one’s site in the profile, which provide quite a bit of authority based on the popularity of both domains.

One voting site you should be submitting content to. – About a year ago, Digg would have been the uncontested champion in this category, but since that time it has been inundated with spam (and disrespectful users) and they’re starting to ban accounts frequently.  Therefore, Mixx is the new site of choice here, and since they also allow links in profiles, creating one is a great opportunity for any link builder.

Two local sites you should be in now. – Google Local is the obvious choice here and, for the most part, their submission process is straightforward.  Go to https://www.google.com/local/add/ and claim your listing before someone else does!  Another excellent local search site is http://www.localsearch.com.  At the moment they don’t have a form for listing submissions, but their contact people respond promptly and are willing to add listings to their index.

A free Wiki Site to use. – While most Wiki sites aren’t particularly SEO friendly, http://www.mywikibiz.com allows registered users to add a Wikipedia-type page about oneself, a business, or pretty much any entity.  Their site is fairly popular and they want lots of content, so go give them some!

A niche site to create a page on. – YouBundle:  It’s neither a Wiki nor a bookmarking site, yet it allows you to create your own content, complete with links.  However, you have to be careful; they only want quality pages that are topically encompassing and (mostly) objective.  I think a couple of my bundles may have already been deleted, but whatever, they’ll never know who I really am!  Wait, which user name did I sign up with again? …

A directory to be in. – Many people are wary of directories these days, but they’re not quite as bad as some make them out to be, especially if you choose the right ones.  Family Friendly Sites is of excellent quality and they have an option for a one-time review fee, which makes them very affordable.  Don’t allow fear of overcrowded categories stop you since most of them are actually very clean; submit your site right now!

Blog commenting you can do right now. – While it’s tempting to try and find a single really great blog post to share, blog commenting has become so essential to certain SEO campaigns that a single post won’t make much difference overall.  So, why settle for one comment?  Go to:  http://linkbuildingbible.com/dofollowdiver/ and search for your keywords.  Their tool finds only DoFollow blogs to comment on, so make them good ones!

This post! – So you’re reading this blog and you’ve gotten this far.  Maybe you like the content and maybe you don’t, but you almost certainly have some kind of an opinion that is valid.  If you think it out and expand on it a little bit, you can come up with something useful to say.  Just make 3 respectful and informative comments on our site and your comment links will become DoFollow; do comment away; we certainly don’t mind.

So there you have it; 10 more links you can get right now.  Even if you did no other link building for a site, these options are a great way to give the search engines many great ways to find your domain and index your pages.

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Link Building is considered to be one of the most effective SEO techniques. If you haven’t done any link building yet, you should consider doing some right now or contact a SEO company that offer Link building services.

Just a quick note about how search engines work first. For a search query entered into the search engine, the algorithm uses rules to identify the most relevant pages, based on the page’s text content and its context (which can be indicated by links from other pages and sites). So essentially inbound links act as a vote to your website.

There are different ways of doing link building but not all are good so you have to be very careful. Below are the link building practices that are considered to be among the best.

Link Directories.
Although link directories are not as effective as they used to be, many can still be considered quality links such as DMOZ and Jayde and are very cost effective.  But not all directories are created equal. There are very few directories left on the web that are still worth submitting to, so don’t put much time or money into it.

Link Exchange
Link exchange with the wrong sort of site can be bad for your website and get you banned from Google so be careful with this strategy. If you use link exchanges, you have to be very selective.

Article and News Submission
The good thing about good article sites or news sites is that their article pages often rank highly and send highly qualified traffic, so as well as getting inbound links from them you will often have qualified traffic click through to your site. So writing an article and submitting it to this kind of website is recommended.

Link Baiting
Link baiting is where the quality of your content is useful or entertaining enough that people will want to link to it, thus improving your number of inbound links and your position in the search engine results pages. It can be done through your website’s content as well as through your blog.

Forums and Blogs
Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and visit your site, link to your site, and/or buy your products. You can also post comments in blogs with a link back to your website.  Some forums us "no follow" so your link may only provide the benefit of traffic to your site.

To conclude remember that Inbound links (one-way text links) using good anchor text are your goal from an SEO perspective. It is much better to have 10 inbound links from related topic sites with a PR of zero, than 100 inbound links from unrelated, PR6 sites. And think long-term when building links, as it takes time to achieve real benefits.

[tags] link building, inbound links, SEO, link exchange, forums, blogs, search engine, link building services [/tags]

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