Blog commenting used to be one of the easiest ways to get relevant backlinks for SEO purposes. But as more and more people abused this technique, mostly by automating spam comments, search engines have made it less significant in their algorithm.

Although that is the case, many websites still receive a good amount of spam comments. In this recently created blog, for example, blog comments turn up almost on a daily basis. So, why are people still people doing it?

For those who are just starting out with a small weblog, commenting on other blogs is an easy way to make yourself known in the blogosphere. This is good for SEO because other bloggers will want to link up with you, or even mention you in their articles.

In the same manner, you will easily establish a network that can help sustain your website’s organic growth (which search engines like). Having an extensive network of friends and co-bloggers on top of your Facebook and Twitter followers can be helpful in bringing in traffic, and dissemination of your content.

Adding a link within a blog comment has lost its backlinking power primarily because a lot of blog platforms have pre-set the comment links to “no-follow”, which means any link posted on a page will not have any bearing when search engines crawl it.

The easiest way to find out if a blog is “no-follow” or “do-follow” is by installing an SEO add-on or plugin on your browser. These things work like magic, revealing no-follow links in just a few clicks. For the the three big browsers:

• Google Chrome: Chrome SEO
• Internet Explorer: SEO Quake
• Mozilla Firefox: NoDoFollow or SEO Quake

If you’re heavily bent on creating SEO-worthy backlinks when blog commenting, here are some things you need to remember:

• Keep busy commenting on “do-follow” blogs only – otherwise, your links (and effort) will be useless.
• Don’t just comment spam, read the blog and provide real comments and insights about the post – you’ll want your comment to get approved.
• Provide something more for the readers when pointing back to your website – give them more information (something that was not mentioned in the article), to compel the readers to visit your website.
• Do your blog commenting sporadically throughout the week – to make it look natural, not automated or spammy.
• Use different versions of your anchor text – Don’t push your keywords too much on every blog comment because it will look unnatural.

Blog commenting nowadays tends to provide more visibility benefit than backlinks. Still, it can provide good quality backlinks, if you do it with good intentions. The power of blog commenting may have dwindled down, but just like any other SEO technique, it’s up to you to use it to the best of your website’s advantage.

Link building as a strategy

We know that link building plays an important role in site ranking. Search engines give more importance to sites that are well-mentioned, because it is a sign of authority.

A one way link is the best kind of link you can get, especially if it’s coming from another authority site, which includes your competition. Search engines give priority to one way links because these are hard to manipulate, hence, more legitimate.

It’s not that easy to ask other webmasters to link to your site without offering something in return. That’s why 2-way links through link exchanges have become popular when doing SEO in the past years. Recently however, 2-way links have begun to look bad in the eyes of search engines.

The link pyramid

2-way links, or reciprocal links, are very easy to come by because of its barter nature. But over the years, the complexity of Google’s PageRank and other factors have made reciprocal links less significant in search ranking. Because of this, 3-way links (link pyramids) are looking like a better option.

An owner of two websites, Website A and Website B, for example, can offer a link exchange with the owner of Website C. The way it is usually set up, Website A is the main website while Website B is a secondary site. The owner will offer a link to Website C from Website B. In return, Website C will link to Website A.

Pros and Cons of 3-way link exchange

This 3-way link exchange will make the links look like one-way links, which is generally good for ranking. Many SEO practitioners are aware of this strategy, there are even tools made to create these links automatically – on a larger scale.

Taking part in a 3-way link exchange sounds like shady business. Using tools to jack up one’s backlinks might be detected by search engines sooner or later, so take caution when getting involved in this trade. Do your research and make sure you will benefit from it before jumping in.

The importance of backlinks is mentioned many times in SEO. Any external link that points to a website is called a backlink.

An external link is a link coming from another website, not your own. These links act like a popularity vote, which help rank a website in search engine results. On the other hand, links that point to a webpage within the same domain is called an internal link. Internal links can also help in SEO.

If you are new to links, there’s a quick tutorial here (now that’s an internal link).

Backlinks can come in the form of text within a paragraph, like if somebody mentions you in a blog post, or text on a sidebar such as in blogrolls. It can also be embedded in images. When a photo from another website is used, it is common courtesy to link back to the owner’s page.

Quality content and good photos can help you get backlinks without any effort – as other people will voluntarily post your noteworthy content to their websites. There are also ways  to put up links to your website out there. Here are some ways to get more backlinks:

• Blog commenting – Commenting on other blogs is a way to interact with people in the blogosphere. By leaving a small link to your blog, you will also create backlinks.
• Forum posting – Take part in forums or discussion boards to attract readers with similar interests. Activate the user signature option to automatically leave a backlink at the end of each post.
• Article marketing – Submit articles (with links embedded) to different article directories regularly. Using article submission tools can help speed up the task.
• Link exchanges – Exchanging links is a common practice among bloggers. This is encouraged as long as the website you’re linking with serves similar content, or else the backlink will be irrelevant.
• Website banners – By offering banner images to your website, readers and other bloggers can easily link to your page by grabbing the banner code. Banner exchanges are also entertained in the same way as link exchanges.
• Guest blogging – Writing articles for other blogs is also helpful in creating backlinks, especially if you are writing for a more influential blog. This also helps your blog become more popular, and receive more traffic.

In SEO, we want to place on the first page, if not on top of the search results. We may never know how search engines work, but we know that the number of backlinks is essential for search engines to measure the authority of a website.

Knowing how to create a link is very important in SEO. Links, or hyperlinks, help direct visitors in and out of a website.

In SEO, the main focus is on incoming links.These types of links help bring in traffic, which is good for a website’s popularity. More importantly, search engines recognize these incoming links when ranking search results.

Basically, the more links there are that points to a website, AKA backlinks, the higher it will rank in search results. Well, that’s the basic formula. There is still a lot more to backlinks, but that merits a whole new blog entry.

It’s easy to create a link when using a blog text editor, like in Blogger or in WordPress. Simply highlight the word or phrase you’d want to have a link, and then just click the link creator button.

WordPress:

Blogger:

Links are usually underlined when hovered by a mouse pointer.

Now, to manually create a link, you don’t need to sweat because the code is simple:

<a href="http://URL">anchor text</a>

Substitute URL with the actual link, and the anchor text with the word or phrase you want to create a link on. Your link should look like this:

Here is a sample link to SEOwebsite.com.

<a href="http://www.seowebsite.com">Here</a> is a sample link to SEOwebsite.com.

Manually entering a link in a blog text editor must be done while you are in HTML view because the code may not work otherwise. When leaving a comment on other blogs, check first if HTML comments are allowed. Although, sometimes, simply entering a link (without any HTML formatting) will do, as it is automatically converted into a hyperlink.

Now that you know how to create a link, try it by leaving your comment below!