Posts Tagged ‘link building’

Blog Commenting: The Short-Term Benefits Vs. The Long-Term Benefits

Commenting on blogs is often cited as being important for any website’s link-building efforts. However, the benefits of blog commenting vary depending on how you approach the process. Most people who are doing it solely to build links and drive traffic to their site leave quick, relatively thoughtless comments on blogs that do not have no-follow turned off. While this may bring your blog instant traffic and links, the long-term benefits of leaving thoughtful comments and building relationships with bloggers is far more valuable.
Blog Commenting for Relationship-Building
When you comment on a blog not just to drop links but to actually interact with the blogger and his/her readers, you build an ongoing relationship that will give you far more benefits in the long run. When you comment on blogs to actually start a valuable conversation, the blogger will be more inclined to take you seriously. Self-serving blog comments may give you visibility, traffic, and links but what about building relationships with other people online that will bring you long-term benefits? If a popular blogger endorses one of your sites or services in the future, it could provide you with far more value than a self-serving link.
The Way Most Marketers Approach Blog Commenting
Most blog commentators that are trying to build links will scan the article in question and leave a comment that is vaguely relevant to the topic at hand. Bloggers love comments and typically read every single one when moderating them. Bloggers will probably remember your company name and the content of your blog comments so in essence, leaving blog comments is an aspect of brand-building. Your blog comment will be seen by hundreds if not thousands of people over the life of the blog and if you are leaving comments that are borderline spam, what does that say about you and your brand image?
The best way to approach blog commenting is by treating it as if it were a part of your marketing campaign. Don’t just leave comments on blogs for the sake of link-building. You can reap far more benefit with thoughtful blog comments because you will be able to network with others and form valuable relationships that will assist you in expanding your business. Furthermore, your blog comments are like advertising for your company and spammy blog comments are only going to hurt your company’s image in the eyes of the hundreds of blog readers who come across them.
It’s obvious to bloggers when you leave generic comments that are there for the sake of driving traffic to your site or building links. Bloggers respect commentators who are actually trying to develop a personal connection and rapport with them. Consider altering your mindset about blog commenting because the benefits of putting more thought into your comments and connecting with bloggers will pay off in the future.
In conclusion, blog commenting should be considered a networking tactic rather than a link-building tactic. The long-term benefits of forging mutually valuable relationships with bloggers are far more promising than the immediate benefits link dropping may offer you. Link dropping may bring you some traffic but the people who read your thoughtless blog comments aren’t going to hold you in very high regard. Building a powerful reputation is an essential component of your success online.

Blog Comments For Link Building or Reputation?

You’ve seen them… those spammy blog comments touting the benefits of herbal Viagra or acai for weight loss. To ensure that hyperlinks would have no SEO value when people left these types of spam comments on certain blogs, HTML NoFollow tags were created by Google in 2005. Any blog comment containing a link that contains the NoFollow attribute does not get any credit when search engine rankings are decided. Many websites and blogs are now using the NoFollow attribute by default to prevent spam comments from being made although sometimes human moderators are still used.
DoFollow blogs do NOT use the NoFollow tag. When people comment on DoFollow blogs and leave a link, that link has SEO value. As such, webmasters and spammers seek out DoFollow blogs so they can leave hyperlinks with anchor text containing their target keywords. It’s easy to find DoFollow blogs by doing a Google search. There are also many tools out there that help you find DoFollow blogs and generate hundreds of generic comments to leave on them. Moreover, services exist that post hundreds of comments with links on DoFollow blogs. Many webmasters and marketers jump on DoFollow blog commenting as an opportunity for link-building because it is cost-effective and easy. However, are the long-term results worthwhile?
The Link-Building Power of DoFollow Blog Comments
When you comment on hundreds of relevant DoFollow blogs, there are certainly SEO benefits. However, it seems that so many webmasters and marketers are desperate for links and forget to take a look at the big picture. The immediate search engine ranking benefits of dropping comments on DoFollow blogs are nice but the long-term benefits of leaving thoughtful comments and connecting with bloggers is far more beneficial as a link-building tactic in the long run.
When you give it some thought, leaving comments on DoFollow blogs may not require you to invest any money but it certainly demands your time. And because your time is essentially money, it’s a good idea to use it wisely and get the highest return for your investment. Rather than just looking at commenting on blogs as an easy way to build links, you ought to use it to your full potential. First off, you must get rid of the narrow mindset that you can only comment on DoFollow blogs. Comment on both DoFollow and NoFollow blogs. Focus on finding blogs that are relevant and popular in your niche rather than worrying about whether they are DoFollow or NoFollow.
The ultimate goal in blog commenting should be to attract direct links to your site from popular bloggers because of your knowledge and reputation. This will have far more power because it will drive droves of targeted traffic to your website.
In essence, commenting on hundreds of DoFollow blogs may offer immediate SEO benefits but when you consider how time-consuming it can be, it may be more worthwhile for you to actually read blogs in your niche and leave thoughtful contributions in the comment section. Ideally your comments would offer helpful information to the blogger and his or her readers.
So there you have it. Consider commenting on blogs whether they are DoFollow or NoFollow with the aim of attracting direct links and reputation. In the long run this tactic will provide you with far more benefits, SEO and otherwise.

Link Building and Why It’s Important

If it’s one thing that is extremely important and essential to Internet marketing, it’s link building. Link building is perhaps most arguably, the most important aspect of running a successful online marketing campaign and/or business. So, how do you get started? There are many ways to engage in link building, but for longevity, you’ll want to start out by building up a steady network of people that you can go to for what is called “link exchanges.”

A link exchange is when one person has a website that interests another person. The whole purpose of exchanging links is to gain exposure to a wider audience (usually one in your niche) as well as to increase your chances of major search engines like Google indexing your page so that others will see it show up higher in the rankings. For example, when you search for a specific term like “car industry” in Google, you may see several results on the first page of results. No doubt that the companies listed on that first page has a voracious link building campaign going on. At the heart of it all, link exchanges are about gaining more exposure for your website in an effort to draw more attention. Which should (hypothetically) draw more traffic, which should yield some sort of profit if the people you attract wind up being interested in what product or service you have to offer?

Link building isn’t that easy though even when you do it with the help of Link building Services or you buy high PR links for your website. There is something known as do-follow and no-follow blogs. As a general rule, you always want to try to find blogs that will allow do-follow comments. Blog commenting is an important part of link building. Blog commenting is simply when you visit someone’s blog, read what they have to say in a particular blog post and then post a response to it. Typically (if the person is nice), they will allow you a place to leave your name, email address and a place for a URL linking back to your website.

If they are really nice, they’ll allow you to include your web URL within the actual body of text that you write on their site. Again, the whole point here is to gain exposure for your blog. When you are leaving a blog comment, you want to try to leave a comment in which you took a little time to read the post so that you have something pertinent to say in your response. The last thing blog owners want to read is a comment by someone that either a) doesn’t make Sense or b) is just a sales pitch for that person’s site. If this happens, you may find yourself very quickly banned from a particular site or labeled as a spammer.

If you own a website (which is different from a blog), many web sites will dedicate a specific page within their sitemap to doing link exchanges. However, while this is fine and is the common thing to do, most people want to become involved in link exchanges where they can have their link placed on a page that gets a lot of traffic or has a high PR rating (such as a PR rating of 5 and above). Link building Services is also a great way to build relationships with other bloggers and business people within your niche. You can learn a lot from this sort of networking while you help to improve the ratings on your site!

Link Building and Why It’s Important

If it’s one thing that is extremely important and essential to Internet marketing, it’s link building. Link building is perhaps most arguably, the most important aspect of running a successful online marketing campaign and/or business. So, how do you get started? There are many ways to engage in link building, but for longevity, you’ll want to start out by building up a steady network of people that you can go to for what is called “link exchanges.”

A link exchange is when one person has a website that interests another person. The whole purpose of exchanging links is to gain exposure to a wider audience (usually one in your niche) as well as to increase your chances of major search engines like Google indexing your page so that others will see it show up higher in the rankings. For example, when you search for a specific term like “car industry” in Google, you may see several results on the first page of results. No doubt that the companies listed on that first page has a voracious link building campaign going on. At the heart of it all, link exchanges are about gaining more exposure for your website in an effort to draw more attention. Which should (hypothetically) draw more traffic, which should yield some sort of profit if the people you attract wind up being interested in what product or service you have to offer?

Link building isn’t that easy though even when you do it with the help of Link building Services or you buy high PR links for your website. There is something known as do-follow and no-follow blogs. As a general rule, you always want to try to find blogs that will allow do-follow comments. Blog commenting is an important part of link building. Blog commenting is simply when you visit someone’s blog, read what they have to say in a particular blog post and then post a response to it. Typically (if the person is nice), they will allow you a place to leave your name, email address and a place for a URL linking back to your website.

If they are really nice, they’ll allow you to include your web URL within the actual body of text that you write on their site. Again, the whole point here is to gain exposure for your blog. When you are leaving a blog comment, you want to try to leave a comment in which you took a little time to read the post so that you have something pertinent to say in your response. The last thing blog owners want to read is a comment by someone that either a) doesn’t make Sense or b) is just a sales pitch for that person’s site. If this happens, you may find yourself very quickly banned from a particular site or labeled as a spammer.

If you own a website (which is different from a blog), many web sites will dedicate a specific page within their sitemap to doing link exchanges. However, while this is fine and is the common thing to do, most people want to become involved in link exchanges where they can have their link placed on a page that gets a lot of traffic or has a high PR rating (such as a PR rating of 5 and above). Link building Services is also a great way to build relationships with other bloggers and business people within your niche. You can learn a lot from this sort of networking while you help to improve the ratings on your site!

Using Blogs as a Link Building Tool

A web blog is a type of website maintained by individuals or organizations with the aim of getting regular comments from the readers. It may include graphics or videos. They provide commentary or news on particular topics while others function as personal web diaries. Link building involves posting a URL (Universal Resource Locator) path in a blog or web page so that readers can follow the path and get certain details on a particular topic. It involves negotiating with web or blog owners in order for them to allow you to build a link in their web pages or blogs. In some instances, some websites offer link building for free and even direct traffic from the blogs to the links.

One of the ways to using a blog as a link building tool is to ask the visitors politely to link or embed your blog to their blogs or websites. Often, the viewers will do so as long as the information provide there is relevant, unique and information that not many others do not offer.

Another easy way to build links in blogs is to participate in theme oriented forums. These forums involve sending reactions to a certain theme started by the owner or just anyone in the blog. Several web pages and blogs provide room for forums, where people can comment and share on certain topic issues provided by the author or an independent person in the blog.

Blog pages like Yahoo Best Answers, Facebook groups and Google groups provide answers to questions on several topics. Users ask questions and others with the knowledge/answers try to give the best answers to the questions asked. In this case, people build links or provide URL paths that tend to answer the questions in mind. Others write articles on topical themes and invite comments for them.

Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and squidoo provide users with the ability to create pages in them and therefore one can create a link back to your blog or website. Further, web feed formats such as RSS (Really Simple Syndicate) can be very important link building tool. Here, publishers syndicate the regularly updated RSS which in many instances include news headlines, audio, videos and general texts posted in a standardized format and this is called a feed. Subsequently, subscribers benefit by reading aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. Here, one can build a link to certain information that is related to the theme.

Video blogs like YouTube allows people to set up videos and further allow users to embed the videos on their blogs or websites. More often than not, people build a viewing audience rather than anchoring text passing links. These videos can include visual texts and moving objects which may have links to some other websites or blogs. Here, audio files can also be set up for listeners. Some of these video blogs provide forums and commentary areas. Users can go ahead and post links by embedding URL texts and articles on the commentary area. Therefore, for optimal link building, blogs offer the best in this regard.

Lastly another option to use blogs as a link building tool is to hire a service that specializes in posting your article to a number of blogs or a network of blogs, by doing this you save the headache of searching throughout the net for blogs and you do not have to worry if your article will be accepted or not because the acceptance rate for these services are normally 100%.