Recommended tools to get you started
Sometimes you just have to break down and do some work if you want your site to optimize. Everyone is looking for the latest tool or trick to get links back to their site but there is just no substitute for good old fashion manual labor. Google can see through all the tricks.
Start with Market Samurai
It is very difficult to determine where is the best place to get your hands dirty when it comes to blogging. You will need a few tools to help you. We highly recommend Market Samurai and Dofollow Diver.
Marketing Samurai is a great tool that helps you figure our which are the highest converting least competitive keywords. It then helps you find where similar content is located on the web and gives you vital information about a target website’s page that helps you determine if it is valuable or not for your optimization when it comes to blogging on it.
Nofollow links hurt your optimization
Getting too many links with the code attribute “nofollow” is generally believed to be harmful to your optimization. The main feature that exists in Dofollow Diver and many similar types of tools have what we call “dofollow detection.” There is no such tag in html as dofollow. It is either nofollow or not. These tools really just look for blog pages that do not have nofollow tags put on their outgoing links and allow you to sort them by page rank.
Tools that highlight nofollow links
This can get kind of tricky but if you have a Firefox add on like Search Status or SEO Quake you can enable the “highlight nofollow links” feature. This will cause a pinkish orange color to surround links with the nofollow attribute. This allows you to quickly scan a page too see if the webmaster has nofollow attributes assigned to links in comments. This saves time and money.
Search engines look for natural patterns
If all that your site had was dofollow links exclusively then that could raise some red flags with the search engines. There is some speculation that Yahoo and MSN give a small amount of SEO credit for nofollow links. Google claims they ignore them altogether. We have previously proven through testing that search engines make exceptions for Yahoo Video, AOL Video, Google Video and Youtube Videos.
Nofollow links still have value
Every site that naturally optimizes has nofollow links. When you are manually creating links and you do not want to pass up a good link page then don’t stress on it. Getting links that bring real visitors is worth it in any event. Traffic also plays a roll in optimization. High page rank pages that have many links to them and lots of traffic are valuable regardless of whether they have the nofollow attribute or not.
Targeted links are far better than generic
One of the toughest issues when building a linking strategy is keeping your links coming from relevant pages on the net. It is very hard to only get links from pages that are similar in content to your own. The major temptation is to just get links from anywhere. It costs the same amount of time so don’t waste it.
Search engine ranking depends on amount of links
If you have 100 links to a page from highly relevant pages and your competition has 200 links but only 50 are relevant, who will out rank the other? In contrast to the intent of search engines the page with 200 links will. Although it will cost them twice as much in time and effort. If you both spend the same and get the same amount of back links then the most relevant links will prevail.
Relevancy can be an indicator of authority and trust
The more non relevant links you have the higher the risk of your site looking like a link spam site. You can artificially inflate your Page Rank but you will be penalized in the actual search result rankings. Many are obsessed with page rank and that has dragged them down into the abyss of not being relevant to Google’s users. If you are not on the first page of search results you don’t really exist.
The link equity of your website matters most
The ratio of dofollow links to nofollow links and the ratio between relevant links and off topic links equals your site’s or that specific web page’s “link equity.” If your site is considered an authority on a topic it will have less spammy nofollow links. The search engines know this and they reward sites that don’t fall into the mass link addiction.
Manual linking is easiest and most productive
Creating back links to your own site is time consuming and many times tedious. Many fall into the trap of repeating comments on many blogs all over the net. The more unique the text is surrounding your link the more SEO juice that link will pass. Besides, the more spammy your links the less likely they are to get approved by the comment moderators. This wastes time and money.
Is more than one link per post okay?
Don’t ever have more than 1 link in 1 post. We can’t emphasize that enough. Most blogs automatically put all comments with more than one link under manual review. This will cause your approval rate to go way down and that wastes your time and time, again, is money.
Should I use clever keyword insertion in my comment name?
Do not use keywords in your name unless the blog doesn’t allow text links in the comments themselves. We tried this a million times.
Comment by: “SEO Link Strategies”
Blah BLah the comment paragraphs.
This would pass a lot of SEO juice but the problem is the comment moderators usually don’t allow “SEO names” and will delete your posts. They don’t have a title tag either in most cases. This strategy should be only used for blogs that allow name links but strip out all links from the comment area itself. Look at the previous posts on the page and check to see of the links are clickable. If not then you know which strategy to use.
Comment text links with title attributes are best
Sites that allow text links in comments are great for SEO. When you find a great dofollow blog like this do not abuse it or waste it. Use the author name that you pen under on your blog as your name or some other normal sounding name. It is better not to have a name link at all, but if you feel you must, just link to your authors profile on your blog, or to a professional writers account at ezinearticles.com or a social profile.
Example of proper comment text link
“Comment by: David”
This doesn’t pass any SEO value but a text link in the body does like:
“Comment: Blah Blah Blah a couple of paragraphs, with your keywords at least in them twice, discussing whatever is being discussed on the page. Click here to read more about search engine optimizaiton. Blah Blah Blah some more sentences to wrap up your comment with one keyword.”
Avoid diluting the link equity of your text links
Notice that “David” is not a link like in the example above it. If you can you only want one relevant text link going to your site without your name being a link which points to the source of the text link as the author. The more links you have on a post, page, or in a comment the less Page Rank or SEO juice each link passes.
Don’t cut your own throat by getting greedy
If “David” was a link then it would cut the value of the text link “search engine optimization” link by half. Page rank flow is divided by the number of outbound dofollow links. Don’t dilute your link equity by getting greedy for links. Many webmasters and bloggers cut their own throats by devaluing their text links in this manner.