Essential SEO Tools & Resources

Ok, so far in this series of posts we’ve discussed several methods for getting inbound links to your web pages in order to boost your search engine rankings.

You can read the previous posts below:

Directory Submissions & Forum Posting
Reciprocal Linking
Article Marketing & RSS Feeds

Now for the final method in this series … Blog Commenting!

Commenting on other people’s blogs will improve your rankings in the search engines, if you do it correctly!

There are two benefits to be had from Blog commenting:

1. You’ll get traffic directly from the comments you leave
2. If you comment on the “right” blogs, your rankings will improve

So what are the things you need to know to boost your rankings:

Well, firstly you need to post comments on blogs that have the “no follow” code turned off. Where “no follow” is included in the code for a link, it means the search engine robots won’t follow the link to it’s destination, so effectively this means that “no follow” links are worthless when it comes to search engine optimisation!

I guess this begs the question … “how do I know if a blog uses the no-follow command or not?”

To find out, visit a blog that has comments on it. Right click on the page and select “view source”. Scroll down until you come to the comment and you’ll see whether or not the command is included, it will look similar to this:

< a href = http://www.domain.com rel=”nofollow”> anchortext < a/ >

If you see rel=”nofollow” you know the comment won’t earn you any ranking juice!

Similarly, when viewing the source code for the page, at the top you may see:

No follow robots meta tag: < metaname =”robots” content=”index,nofollow” >

Again, if you see “nofollow” in the meta tag, any links from that page will be worthless.

So for your blog comments to carry ranking weight, they have to be on pages that don’t use the nofollow code.

Ideally, the blogs you comment on for ranking purposes want to have some page rank themselves. You can see the Page Rank for a page in the Google Toolbar. If you don’t use it, click on this Toolbar link to download it. You want to comment on high page rank blogs related to your niche.

So now you know what you need to do.

BUT how do you actually find “dofollow” blogs in your niche with high page rank?

Well, the long winded manual route involves searching on Google for related blogs, then checking their source code and page ranks individually … not really conducive to getting hundreds of links!

Alternatively there are various directory sites that list “dofollow” blogs. You could take a look at these sites:

http://www.backlinkspot.com
http://www.dofollowblogs.com
http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow

Using the above directories, you should find quite a few blogs that you can post on and get some juice out of the links!

Now to the best method of all for finding “dofollow” blogs … Quickly!

Until recently, I’d not come across the free software I’m about to tell you about … but I’m glad I’ve got a copy now! It’s called

http://www.fastblogfinder.com

There’s a free version and a paid version, once you’ve used the free version you can decide whether or not you need the full version, it’s $49.

Basically with Blog Finder, you type in a keyword and the software returns up to 50 related blogs (unlimited blogs with the paid version). For each blog returned, it shows you:

· the domain PR and blog page PR
· whether the blog page is (”dofollow” or “nofollow”)
· the quantity of outgoing links on the page

I don’t have to tell you the value of this information. In no time at all you can comment on high page rank posts that will boost your own rankings.

Blog Finder is simple and quick to use, it allows you to post comments on the blogs you select directly from the program itself.

Here is how you build backlinks with Fast Blog Finder:

· type the keywords or a keyword phrase that you want to find blogs for and click Start
· when the search is complete, select a blog URL. The page opens directly in Blog Finder.
· post your comment and click Submit
· open the next blog and submit the next comment, etc.

With Fast Blog Finder it takes minutes to find themed blogs and submit comments to them. When you start using Blog Finder, you’ll get high ranking websites linking back to your websites.

Another top feature that comes with the software is that with one click of your mouse you can submit the pages that you comment on to social media sites from within the program.

Free software doesn’t get any better than this!

When you write your comments, make them meaningful to the post your commenting on, don’t just spam the other blogs. Quality comments will draw traffic to your site. Write good comments, and the people that read them will visit your site through your link.

Usually, when you leave a comment, your name appears as the “anchor text” for the link to your url. Read some of the other comments on each blog. If other comments have keywords in the name field instead of the person’s name, do the same, use some keywords to add value to your link. If no other comments have keywords in the name field, use your name to ensure your comment gets accepted.

Final tips, look for new posts on the blogs you find and make a comment quickly so that it’s one of the first to appear. Early comments get read by more people and will therefore attract more direct traffic. Finally, don’t just link back to your homepage … link to lots of different pages on your site to boost individual page rankings.

So there you have it. Visit the “dofollow” directories above and get yourself a copy of Blog Finder. Very quickly you should be able to build hundreds of relevant, high page rank links back to your own web pages, then just watch your own rankings soar!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of posts on boosting your search engine rankings, if so leave a comment and subscribe to my feed … there’s lots more quality content coming in the next few weeks!

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