By
Doug McCoy
If you have a website of any type, I am sure you have heard of the
importance of backlinks in regards to SEO, (
search engine optimization),
or in layman's terms, getting organic, (free), traffic from search
engines. What is sometimes overlooked is the importance of these being
quality backlinks, meaning they relate to the content of your own site.
What we are going to discuss here is:
* First, what is a backlink
* Second,what gives a backlink "quality"
* Third, why are blogs good for backlinking
* Fourth, using comments on blogs for backlinks
* Fifth, the importance of relevant comments
A
backlink occurs when the address of your website, i.e. your link, is
placed on another site, whether one of yours or someone else's. When a
search engines robot visits the other site, it will pick up your link,
and follow to your site. This process helps alert the search engine of
the existence of your site and increases the chances of your site being
found in a search, bringing free, organic traffic to your site.
A
backlink will be considered to have quality if the subject of the host
site is related to the subject of your site in some meaningful way. For
example, if the subject of your site is sports equipment, and you put
your link on a site discussing physics, it would not be relevant.
However if you put your link on the fan site of a sports team, you would
have a very relevant backlink.
Blogs are a great place to include
a backlink to your site. Why? Because most blogs are being updated on a
consistent basis, they usually contain original content, and these are
two things search engines, particularly GOOGLE, love and will seek out
with their robots. Most blogs, especially those using WordPress are
pinged, (notice of new content sent to search engines), the moment they
post a new blog entry. Therefore, placing your backlink on a blog gives
you a very good chance of being noticed on a consistent basis.
Comments
are the method of choice for placing your backlink on a blog. Some
blogs have link pages, some have blog rolls, or other methods of formal
link sharing, but almost all of them allow comments on blog posts. Why?
Because comments create more original content for their blog, which
helps the blog with search engines, (see comment on GOOGLE above). When
you leave a comment, you are usually asked to enter your name, email,
and are offered the opportunity to place your web address as well, how
nice.
Now please, understand, not just any comment will do. On
most blogs, certainly on mine, comments must be approved by the blog
admin before they get posted on the blog. Most comments will not be approved, trust me on this, unless they are
relevant to the blog post you are commenting on. The rule here is quite
simple, leave a quality comment, and you will get a quality backlink.
Let
me put this in a nutshell for you. If your desire is to
create free
organic traffic from search engines through the use of backlinks: find
blogs that are relevant to your site; find a blog post that interests
you; make an interesting or informative comment,(do not say buy this or
go here, very bad); repeat this process on different blogs as often as
possible.
There are programs to help you find relevant blogs to
post on, and these work great, but stay away from auto-comments as these
will not work on any quality blog site.
Find relevant blogs, leave relevant comments, and
start building quality backlinks to your websites.