Easy Way To Build Links To Your Blog
December 8, 2009 by David B. Ascot
Filed under Marketing
Link building is an essential part of optimising your blog or website for search engines. While building links which point to your site may sound like a simple task, it can be challenging to produce enough high quality links to improve your search engine ranking significantly.
One of the easiest ways to build links back to your blog is via commenting on “dofollow” blogs. It’s simple to do, but it’s surprising how many people stuff it up.
So what do I mean by “dofollow”?
To answer that question, you first have to know about “nofollow”. “Nofollow” an attribute of the anchor tag used to specify links in HTML. By placing the “nofollow” attribute on a link, a webmaster can BLOCK any “link juice” passing from their website to your website. In other words, the “nofollow” attribute makes a link useless from an SEO point of view.
Once blogs started to become a popular part of the web, spammers began looking for ways to exploit the situation. They did this by posting comments which were essentially spam, including links to gambling, porn and pharmaceutical sites.
That’s when major blogging platforms such as WordPress instituted the “nofollow” attribute as the default setting for blog comments. The idea was to eliminate the incentive to post comment spam.
As you know, this wasn’t completely effective. There’s still lots of comment spam going on; every blog can benefit from anti-comment spam plugins like Akismet – I’ve eliminated more than 500,000 spam comments on one blog alone this way!
So, instituting the “nofollow” plugin on WordPress has been a total failure. So much so that a plugin has been created called DoFollow that is designed to disable the NoFollow attribute on external links and make comment links “count” for search engine optimisation purposes.
Seeing as it’s pretty much mandatory to moderate blog comments, my view is that it’s OK for comment links to pass some SEO value.
There are now many blogs using the “dofollow” plugin; you’ll just need to:
1.Be on the look out for DoFollow blogs (for example, DoFollowBlogs.com)
2.Be posting regular comments on DoFollow blogs
3.Watch your search engine rankings increase
This is just one of many possible link building strategies you could use; if your niche is a competitive one, posting comments on dofollow blogs won’t be enough on its own. That said, dofollow comments are a technique which can produce real results for the majority of blogs and sites offering a product or service.
The key to this strategy is consistent application. Don’t post one comment and forget about it. Post regularly to key blogs over a period of weeks and months and you’ll start to see the benefits.
Keep in mind that your comments will likely be moderated, so don’t make the mistake a lot of people make and post advertisements for your product or service – most bloggers will simply delete these.
Posting genuinely thoughtful comments will be more likely to net you clickthroughs as well as help your search engine ranking.
Remember, you can assign the task of posting blog comments to others; just make sure that you are confident that they will post comments of sufficient quality that they will pass muster and make it up onto the site.
About the author: Mr David B. Ascot is an expert on sales lead generation and he shares his knowledge on improving your online lead generation.
