One of the most important factors in how well your website ranks in the search engines for the terms your potential customers are searching is how many links you have pointing to your website.

One of the things which will happen if you hire an SEO to help improve your search engine rankings will be that they will talk to you about getting links to your site (they should, anyway). They’ll talk about Organic Link Building, Reciprocal Links, Directory Submissions, and all sorts of stuff you’ve probably never heard about, nor need to know about.

Whilst I won’t go into judging the quality of sites as places you’d like to get links from here (that’s a post for another day), I’m going to talk about a really good way you can go hunt out places to put your link. The best thing about this kind of link is that you don’t even have to ask the other webmaster if you can have a link from his site. He wants you to put your link on his site, and here’s why:

I’m talking here about commenting on blogs relevant to your website’s subject. Blogs just like this one! (Links from relevant sites are looked upon more favourably by the search engines when determining the value of the links than links from irrelevant sites)

First, we’re going to work out what the main keyword of your site is. Let’s say for arguments sake that you are a Home Loan Broker in Adelaide (Shout out to Steve, who’s awesome new site will go live in a couple of days!). You main keyword might be “Home Loan”

Now we need to find blogs which are about Home Loans, we could just do a google search for Home Loan, but that doesn’t really give us what we want, as most of the top sites for those keywords won’t be blogs, so we can’t place a comment on them - we’re going to take advantage of what’s called a footprint. A footprint is something which a lot of sites have in common about their architecture.

Fortunately, the software that is by far the most popular blogging platform, Wordpress, has a built in footprint we can use to find Wordpress blogs.

If you look at the bottom of any Wordpress blog, you’ll generally see the following: “powered by WordPress”. We’re going to use this footprint to help google find relevant blogs for us.

Here’s what we’re going to type into google:

home loan “powered by wordpress”

Now we are going to sift through the results we get back from google, looking for blogs which allow us to leave comments.

Note (and this is important!) - Don’t spam these blogs. Don’t just leave a comment like “Great post, keep up the good work”. The owners of these sites are your peers, your site is about the same thing that theirs is about. You know their business - get involved in the conversation, in a productive way.

Now once we’ve found a blog which will allow us to leave comments, read the latest posts, and find something that you think that you can add to. You will see four boxes at the bottom of the comments - Enter your name, your email address, and your website address, then leave your comment.

Using this technique is a great way to build links from relevant sites, and it won’t cost you a cent. Who knows, you might even make some friends out of it. :-)


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Getting links yourself, rather than paying a Search Engine Optimiser

Posted on 09.11.08 to Link Building. Tags: , , , , , .