Building links to your blog through commenting on other blogs
Building links to your blog for search engine rankings is little different from building relationships with people in the real world — networking — for desired jobs and positions.
Employers judge prospective employees based on references from other individuals. If the prospective employee is in good favor with people in high positions, specifically positions in the same industry, the employer is more likely to hold the applicant in higher regard. It is no different in the cyber world. Commenting on other blogs relevant to your niche is just another method you can use to get search engines to hold your site in higher regard, thereby giving you higher rankings and more traffic.
Think of a search engine as an employer seeking a man for a job. The job is specific to the search term entered by a user and those applying for the job are the many sites and pages that the search engine has in its index. The search engine asks these questions for each site in its index: is the site reputable? Is it productive? Do other sites in the same topic range hold it in high regard?
If all of those questions are answered correctly for your site, then you get the job! Google and other search engines will rank you well for that keyword and send visitors there on a regular basis.
Commenting on other blogs: a great way to give your blog reputation for search engines
Probably the most important factor search engines use to determine a site or page’s ranking for a keyword is external links. External links are links pointing to your site that add to the site’s reputation.
The most easy and free way to get external links to your site is through commenting on other blogs. Most comment modules will allow you to enter in the URL (address) of your website and include it in your comment. Once you have posted a comment, a search engine will crawl the page, see the link, and give your site more reputation.
There is somewhat of a science behind building links to your blog through commenting but below are a few essential tips that every blogger should know.
- Do not waste your time with nofollow links. Before commenting on another blog for links, always check if the comment links are nofollow. If the link is nofollow, search engines will NOT follow the link and NOT give your site a better reputation. You can determine if the comment links on a blog are nofollow in Internet Explorer by viewing the source and checking whether or not rel= “nofollow” is added in the <a> tag for the link. In Firefox, you only need to right click then click properties; if the link is nofollow, the word “nofollow” will appear beside “Relation:”. In Chrome, you need to right click the link then click “inspect element;” if the link is nofollow, a rel=”nofollow” will be added inside the <a> tag for the link. Some blogs will specify whether or not they add the nofollow relation for comment links. A great way to find blogs that do not add the nofollow relation in comments is by browsing through dofollow blog directories.
- Choose your anchor text carefully. Anchor text is the portion of text which is linked. For instance, in the previous sentence, the anchor text is only the word “linked.” Choosing the right anchor text is so important because it is what search engines use to determine what that link is about. If the anchor text is “horse shoes,” search engines will more likely add reputation to the site linked to for the search term “horse shoes.” Most blogs will link the text you enter in the name field to the site you indicate in the site field. You will have to be crafty about what name you choose because you want it to have anchor text that is relevant to your site or page but you don’t want it to be marked as spam. For this blog, which is a blog about blogging, I use names like “blogger man” and “blogger” because it makes for relevant anchor text and does not necessarily interpret as spam.
- Choose the surrounding text carefully. The actual comment you enter should be highly relevant to the topic you want to rank well for. Search engines like Google not only examine anchor text but also surrounding text to determine what the site or page linked to is about. It is also wise to make your comment lengthy and relevant to the blog post so that it does not get marked as spam. Links surrounded by higher portions of surrounding text will always be held in higher regard by search engines like Google than links with less surrounding text.
- Comment on blogs that are relevant to your niche. Google will give little or no reputation to a blog about learning guitar if it is linked to in a comment from a blog about politics. The only exception is if the specific post commented on is relevant to guitars. Only comment on blogs about a similar topic as your blog.
- Comment on blogs that have a good reputation. A simple but not infallible way of determining if a blog has a good reputation is by checking its Google page rank. You can check page rank by using a page rank checker. A great way to find blogs that have a good reputation is to browse dofollow blog directories that list the Google PageRank of every blog in the directory.
There are many other ways to get high quality links to your blog that will allow you better ranking for keywords — commenting is just one of them. I plan on writing many future posts that will explain the various other link building methods. Stay tuned!
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Tags: blog seo, link building
