As I discussed in the last post, gaining backlinks to your website is one of THE most important things you can do to improve your search engine rankings and if done correctly it can give you significant gains. Backlinking is no longer just about quantity, it's about the quality of the links you get. In a sense quantity of links still comes into it, of course you want to have as many links as possible BUT this should not be your intitial aim of the link building process.

The problem many people find with backlinks is that they often don't know where to get them from, certainly there are processes we can all follow like submitting articles, blog commenting, web 2.0 link building, cherry picking and the list goes on and on but if you don't target your link building efforts in the right places then you may be working a lot harder than you need to.

If I told you that I have a site which ranked number 35 in Google for my chosen two word phrase which I took to position number 2 within just over a week and a half would you belive me, well I hope you would but it sounds a little unlikely right? Before you get yourselves over excited I don't have some magic formula which I'm going to reveal to you, I don't have the answer to pummle the Google algorithm. What I do have though is good detective skills Read the rest of this entry »

Ultimately if you want traffic from the search engines you MUST get your website listed within the first 20 listings for your chosen keyword phrase, to do this you simply cannot get away from the fact you are going to have to get backlinks to your website. There was a time when building as many backlinks to your websites as humanly possible was the thing to do. If you were trying to rank above competitors in the search engines for a given keyword or phrase one of the factors you looked at was the number of backlinks that site had.  Now, whilst we still look at the number of backlinks a site has when trying to rank above it, amongst many other factors, the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. While this sounds obvious to many of you, you would be surprised the amount of people who are still concentrating on the quantity rather than quality. Read the rest of this entry »

If I say blog commenting to you it can bring up all sorts of ideas into your head, for most people they think that blog commenting is about visiting a bunch of blogs and simply leaving a comment like 'great post' or 'thanks for the post'. This is what I would call the wrong way to go about blog commenting. Blog commenting overall can be a very powerful way of getting traffic back to your blog providing that it is approached in the correct way and not with the attitude of a spammer.

There are what I consider as two main types of blog commenting. The first kind is the kind which helps build backlinks for the search engines, these are links from the 'dofollow' blogs. These links affect how your site is ranked by the search engines, page rank etc.

The second type is blog commenting for physical readers, this is where you actively contribute to a blog by providing relevant and helpful comments. However, in most cases the link back to your site will be attributed with the 'nofollow' tag, meaning your site may get little benefit from a search engine point of view. Just because of this many people assume its a waste of time but you'd be surprised how much traffic you can get from it.

In this post I will be discussing the second of the two mentioned above.  I am going to try and cover some of the most common mistakes which people make when it comes to blog commenting and hopefully you will understand the better ways there are to go about it and how powerful it can be when done correctly.

Mistake Number 1: Posting irrelevant and random comments on someones blog with only one thing in mind, your traffic!

From my point of view when I am commenting on someone's blog I am doing it because I am interested in the site, what the person is writing about or because I have an opinion on what they are saying. Of course the aim is trying to build traffic to my blog/site but this is the last thing you should be thinking of. Always comment honestly and with the right intentions, just think before you comment and ask yourself 'Would I approve this comment?' and 'Would I appreciate this comment?'. If the answer to both of those questions is no then don't post it on someone elses blog, it is neither helpful or useful and it won't do you any favours in the long run.

Mistake Number 2: Don't comment blindly on every blog in your niche area.

If you want to find releveant blogs to comment on then there is a great and easy way to do it by using Google blog search. If you visit google.com and from the 'more' option select 'blogs' you can type in your niche or topic and search for blogs which are related to your site and these may be sites you wish to comment on. Here is where people start to make the mistake, they go ahead and start commenting on every blog in the list. What you need to remember is that google is looking for natural linking to your site, natural linking is not going from 0 to 500 links in one day and you will be penalized for this, essentially you are trying to 'win' google's trust and comment spamming is not the way to go about it.

With the list of blogs you have come up with, do some further investigation and find out a few things about the sites you are going to be commenting on, find out:

1) What the traffic to that blog is like; a good way of finding this out is by looking at the alexa ranking at alexa.com, you may find installing the alexa firefox extension quite useful for this purpose.

2) What the Google page rank of the site is; I find that the SEO Toolbar from SEOBook.com is a really useful way of keeping an eye on your competition's page rank & number of backlinks along with a few other important things. Page rank is not going to be hugely important and if the other 4 points here are good then I personally may choose to discount it.

3) How often the blog is updated; you are aiming to comment on blogs which are updated at the very least of once a week but preferably more than that.

4) How many people are commenting; the amount of people commenting on a blog gives you an idea of how popular the site is and how interactive the visitors are.

5) How many readers are subscribed to the blog; you can usually find this out if there is a small blog reader icon which will have the number of subscribed readers for that blog in, this will give you a good idea of how many people actually read the blog posts.

In all you should be aiming to find a list of around 10-20 blogs which meet the majority of the things above. Once you have found these blogs you should spend time becoming part of the community of followers on that blog and get involed. Don't comment for selfish purposes, although you are ultimately trying to get traffic to your own blog that must not be your only motive.

Mistake Number 3: Post a comment which offers no quality or relevance to the blog.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, people visit a blog blindly and make a comment which has no relevance to the post and is of no use to anyone reading it. When you are commenting you should try to become part of the discussion in that post, try and contribute something if you can. If you found the post particularly interesting or you liked an area of it then say so, if you have something to add to what was said then add it. What your ultimately aiming for is to be visiting these blogs on a regular basis and getting involved in the blogging community around that individual site. The more you make an active contribution then the sooner you will see traffic coming through to your own blog from people who are interested in you and perhaps want to find out more about you.

The important thing here is that these people are actively visiting your site, they are taking the time out to come over to your blog and find out what you are selling or what you are talking about. These are not just empty backlinks you are getting, it is targeted traffic. The traffic will be coming through click thru's from your hyperlinked name, I personally never place a direct link into a comment unless it is 100% relevant to the discussion and unless you are completely comfortable in that community then you shouldn't either.

Give blog commenting a go, you may find you even learn a few new things from reading all those new blogs, both about the topic they are writing about and how to build a good blog.

The above guide is very brief and I have tried to cover as much as possible in a relatively short post (eventhough I realise this is quite long). When you are trying to build your search engine ranking it can get a whole lot more complicated but the basic ideas remain the same, which is always provide a useful contribution and treat the blogging community with respect.