DIY SEO: Blog Commenting
April 16, 2008
Another simple way to increase to increase your website or blog’s inbound links is by commenting on blogs related to your industry. It takes just a few minutes to gain high quality, one-way, relevant inbound links - and you might just learn something you can use while you do it! It’s important to stick to blogs about your particular industry, since Google and other search engines give higher priority for links coming from pages with similar topics.
Where to find relevant blogs?
- Simply Google the industry + “blog” For example, the term “fishing charter blog”
- BlogCatalog directory (there are many other directories). Browse or search
- Technorati Search your targeted keywords, and check out the top results
Add to the Conversation
Nobody likes the guy who posts “I’m the best Fishing Guide in FL, check me out.” Blatant advertisement is likely to be deleted quickly, and very few people will follow the link to your site this way. Rule of thumb is to either add something complimentary, or something thoughtful is even better - it doesn’t have to be esoteric however.
How to Comment for Maximum SEO Effect
On most blogging platforms, there will be three boxes that you’ll need to fill out. Here’s a couple tricks to get the most out of the comment you’re about to enter:
- Name
The name attribute is what’s going to make up the written text of the link. It helps (greatly) in SEO to have keywords in this text because it tells search engines what the link target (your website) is all about. Now some bloggers won’t take kindly to the name “best Florida fishing guide.” That said, if you’re business name includes some of your target keywords, then it should be OK to use that name. To simplify, entering the name “Bob” doesn’t help much unless your trying to rank well for “Bob” in Google. - URL/website/address
Called by various names, but in all cases it is the target of the aforementioned link. Usually you want to include your home page, but it’s good practice to vary them a little bit, especially when you have a page that is relevant to the blog post at hand. Also, if you have other content rich pages that you’d like to rank well for a given term, include it here. An example of this is if you operate a guide service off of a particular island or offer an “overnight” charter option.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I’m glad you mentioned that people should make comments of substance not blatant plugs for their own site/business. The people who are simply there to get the link are so obvious. I usually delete those sorts of comments on the blogs I write.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I agree completely, but have been generous so far here. Heck, I guess the whole point of this blog is about e-marketing, so I’m going to let them go here for the time being.
June 1st, 2008 at 8:51 am
Hi Wade, you may want to also touch on if the backlinks blog comments provide are nofollow links. If your links are set to a no-follow attribute then Google and many other search engines are not going to count them as backlinks. I make sure all of my blogs including http://www.foxlakefishing.com have the dofollow plugin added to help my commenter’s get a good backlink with the anchor text they want. Oh and by the way thanks for stopping by and commenting yourself. Bruce