Blog Commenting – Good For Traffic & Backlinks?

Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by Boyd Norwood in Blogging, Internet - How To

Who knew that simply commenting on blogs would be a great source of traffic to your site and in some cases good for seo value and creating backlinks to your site.

Now that you know this, it is time to really dig in and understand blog commenting and how to use it effectively.  If you follow these steps that are layed out for you, you will start to see traffic and a boost in your organic search rankings.

1. Finding Related Blogs

This is important and not important at the same time.  There is a phrase in the SEO world that says, "a link is a link".  However, if you are commenting on blogs that are related to your niche or industry, you are much more likely to receive qualified buyers coming to your website to buy your products or services.  You can also comment on just about any blog and receive traffic, but they are not pre-qualified buyers.  Having a nice mix of both related and non-related blogs to comment on is a good idea.  You can find industry related blogs by doing a search on Technorati.

2. Using The Proper "Name" When Filling Out The Name Field

This will make or break your blog commenting efforts.  Using the proper name will not only help you with SEO link value, but it will help readers of that particular blog know what your website is about.  You will want to use your keywords that you are trying to rank for when selecting your name.  In addition to that, you will want to select the appropriate page of your website that is related to your keyword to use as your URL>  For example, if my website was about Blackberry Cell Phones, I would do the following…

• Name: Blackberry Cell Phones / URL: www.blackberry.com
• Name: Blackberry Bold / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrybold
• Name: Blackberry Storm / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrystorm

3. Don’t Spam Comment

This should be common sense, but for most people it is not.  They just want to rip out blog comments like nobodies business.  This is not how to blog comment!  You need to take time to read the post that you are going to comment on and then in the most professional manner, make an educated comment that adds value to the post and adds value to any readers to read your comment.  If you get lazy, even once, your comment could be marked as spam, reported to Askimet, and your comments will never see the light of day on any blog currently using the Askimet plugin.

Remember, you are a guest on other people’s blogs.  Don’t do anything that would make them mad or that would make them not like you.  You want to become friends with them, add value to their blog, and respectifully take their faithful readers and turn them into your customers.

What Defines A Quality Backlink?

Posted on 12. Nov, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization

One topic that is usually misunderstood by many individuals trying to do SEO on their website is that of quality backlinks.  In the SEO industry all of the guru’s have stated their opinions on what defines a quality backlink.  It comes down to five major factors.  I will discuss each of these below.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is one of the biggest factors that influence what keywords you are raking for in the search engines.  Anchor text is the text that is found in the actual link pointing to your website.  At ioVentures we are trying to rank for many different keywords such as search engine optimization company.  Search engine optimization company is our anchor text that links to our landing page that talks about search engine optimization. You see, the search engines use links pointing to your website to help determine what your website is about and what your site should be ranking for.  Imagine if your site was about making brownies and you had a hundred links pointing to your site that say "click here" or "making chocolate chip cookies".  First of all, your site probably wouldn’t rank very well since the anchor text doesn’t have anything to do with your site.  Second, if you managed to get ranked for a keyword that isn’t related to your site, your conversion would be horrible.

One other thing that I should probably mention about anchor text, you need to vary the keywords you use when you get links.  Unfortunately, I learned this one the hard way.  When I first started out doing SEO, I used the exact same anchor text in each of my links.  I couldn’t climb the rankings for even the easy keywords.  Come to find out, the search engines analyze the number of links, your anchor text, and dozens of  other factors to determine if your linking patterns look natural.  If you were a search engine looking at all of my links that say the exact same thing, would that look natural to you?  Of course not!  This is referred to as Google Bombing.

So, what you need to do instead is come up with some variations of your keyword (at least 5) and use them as your anchor text.  (Read our post about grouping your keyword phrases into clusters).  For a website about making brownies you might want to use the following variations, making brownies, making gourmet brownies, instructions on making brownies… well, you get the picture.  This will make your linking profile look as natural as possible.  You might also want to throw some "click here" or "visit our website" in the mix as well.  Anything you can do to make your links look natural will boost your rankings greatly.

Related Content

Another huge factor that determines how good of a link you have pointing back at your website is the type of content on the page that links to your site.  If at all possible, you want to find links that are coming from pages that are very similar to yours.  You can tell if a page has related content by looking at the keywords in the title tag, header tags, and body of the text on that page. 

Basically if the site has something to do with your site, those links are the best to be on the hunt for.  The reason for this is because the search engines will not only see your anchor text that is specific to your website, but they will also see that another site in your industry is saying that your site is recommended by them.  These types of links with the proper anchor text are powerful links.

So remember, the more relevant the better.

Page Rank

Although not as important, page rank helps you rank higher in the search engines.  If you are a beginner, you are probably asking, what is page rank?  Page rank is a ranking that Google allocates to every web page on the internet.

Every link pointing to a web page passes along some page rank points.  The more links a web page acquires, the greater its page rank will be over time.  Generally speaking, the higher the page rank of a page, the higher the authority of that page meaning any links acquired from that page to yours is of higher value.

So, you will want to find links from sites that have high page rank.  Page rank goes from 0-10 with ten obviously being the highest.  The higher the page rank, the more that will be passed to your site.

Number of Links Going To Other Websites On The Page

The number of links on a webpage is a factor of quality.  The more links on one web page, the more diluted the power of each link becomes.  Less page rank is passed on through each outgoing link because it is distributed between more links. 

Link Positioning

To tell you the truth, sometimes you really can’t control this factor.  It has been proven that links within the content of a web page or blog post hold more value than those in a footer or nav bar.  These types of links also hold more power the closer they are to the top of the content or in other words, toward the beginning of the content.  The first link that the search engines see on a web page, the more authority they give that link.

I hope that this will help you in your link building efforts.  If done properly, your link building will really influence your website rankings.  Remember that you can’t control all of these factors in every situation but do the best that you can. 

The key to a successful link building campaign is to ALWAYS BE GETTING LINKS!  Be consistent and persistent your link building efforts and it will pay of with top rankings eventually. 

If you have any questions or comments about this topic, please feel free to make a comment below.

The Press Release – Publicity on the Web

Posted on 21. Oct, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

Does your site have something big that they want to show to the web? Perhaps you have a new product line that was added to your catalog. Your website may have just outgrown its prior facilities and you are now changing locations. Anything that happens to your site and your business ought to be made known.    

How can you get your story out there? The best way for you to do this is going to be a Press Release. A press release is a viable option where you will write a story on what is occurring in your company, or you can write a promotion for a new product you are distributing. Whatever your big news, you have the option of getting into the hands of the media so that they can grab it if they so choose.

Usually, you should not stress if your phone does not ring. There is link building power in the release itself.  Any media pick-up that might happen would be an added bonus. What then can you do to make your press release a strong link source for your site?   

You should choose a release package that fits your needs and budget. There are free press release sites, yet you should know that you get what you pay for. It will be worth your while to budget and get a quality press release done. Find the site that you wish to use. Two suggestions would be prweb.com and prleap.com.

Some of the things you will want to do as you write your press release would be the following:

1. Make sure to place links in the content of your press release. These links are the key purpose behind your release and they should not be excluded.
2. Be sure to use your keyword clusters as the anchor text for those links.
3. Be careful to only link once to each URL that you place in the press release.
4. Don’t use text with all caps.
5. Use a quote and some analytical information. This still ought to have meat to it so you can have the possibility of more media exposure.

If done correctly, a press release will be a great link building tool, and an opportunity for possible extra exposure. Be sure to track the effects of your press release and see the results of it. Watch your web traffic, analyze your amount of subscribers and return visitors to your site. All of these can be influenced by press releases. Do a good follow-up and analysis for yourself to see where you can change the way you use this tool.

In short, using press releases at times when you see fit will be a great way to build up your site, increase your traffic, and increase your site’s exposure.

Header Tags

Posted on 10. Oct, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

When attempting to optimize your site for the search engines, there are structural pieces that become vital to your success. Certain locations on your website are more strategic for the placement of your key phrases. This is because search engines use algorithms that do not value all content the same.

Imagine a newspaper. When you are reading the newspaper, what do you do? You browse headlines to find the articles that interest you.  Once you find an article of interest, you might scan the article first looking at subheadlines to guide you.  We can all agree that the words in headlines and subheadlines are more important than the main body of the article.

In similar fashion, search engine bots read over the content of your web pages.  The bots tend to give more importance to phrases in headlines and subheadlines.  But what is considered a headline/subheadline to the search engine bots?  The answer is simple: Header Tags.  

Even though your page title might be big and bold and look like a headline to a human being, it is not seen as a headline to Google or other search engines unless it is turned into a header tag.  Those header tags are labeled in the code of your website, and the search engines look for those tags. Like the eyes that are looking for a relevant story, the search engines will place priority on H1 tags that cater to the desired search. 

You can make any text a header tag by simply adding a small snippet of html code around the text within the code of the website page.  Header tags range from h1 to h6 and the code looks like this:

<h1>Page Title Goes Here</h1> or

<h2>Subheadings Go Here</h2>

That’s it.  It’s not much code but adding them will help with your onsite optimization efforts.

How to put header tags into practice:

Put the main keyword phrase from that page’s cluster in the h1 tag for sure.  If you have any subheadings that are there for the user and they contain keyword phrases from that page’s cluster, then turn those into h2 tags.

Feel free to ask questions below.