5 SEO Linkbuilding Tips to Boost Search Results In Google
September 11, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
38 Comments
Yesterday afternoon I left the office early to go golfing with my brother at the Parsippany Knoll East golf course (in Parsippany, New Jersey, of course) and since I was on the Links I got to thinking about my next blog post about linkbuilding. It occurred to me that I’m always telling clients the most important aspect of increasing your search result visibility within Google is to build links; but I never really mention how.
From the 1st Tee at the Knoll East Golf Course in Parsippany, NJ
Most clients don’t really care about how linkbuilding gets done; similar to when they take their car to a mechanic for repairs they don’t ask for a detailed how-to-do-it-yourself example. But for those of you who would like to try doing it yourself, I put together:
SEO Tips For Building Links To Your Website
An easy way to get a few links back to your site is to leave meaningful, worthwhile comments on blogs which do not use the rel=nofollow attribute. That doesn’t mean spam a bunch of blogs with comments like “Nice post!”. Look for blogs which are relevant to your niche, and try and build a relationship with the owner by leaving thoughtful comments. When you enter your name in the comment area, try using at least one of your target keywords; but again, don’t spam it with something like “Buy Cheap Automotive parts in Morris Plains, NJ”. If you actually are promoting car parts, look for a blog about cars and talk about the subject and how it relates to both you and the blog owner.
1. But how do you find dofollow comments? Here’s a Google query tip from Slightly Shady SEO about using Google image search to find dofollow blogs:
Using Google Image Search, run a query on the term “U Comment I Follow“. Many blogs using dofollow comments have this image on their website. By running a query on the alt text, “U Comment I Follow“, you’ll find them.
2. Here’s another Google query tip I picked up in the Digital Point Forum. Try googling a query which will look for blogs which allow comments:
{Your Niche Market Keyword} +blog "Notify me of follow-up comments"
So if your niche market is “nj seo” you would enter:
nj seo +blog "Notify me of follow-up comments"
Now this works for some keywords better than others, but the premise is that any blog which allows comments usually adds the text “Notify me of follow-up comments” under the comment submission form. You’ll still have to check the Google PageRank and nofollow status of the comments, both of which are easily accomplished in Firefox with the Google toolbar and SEO plugin.
3. Looking for .edu or .gov blogs to add links? There’s not as many out there, but you might find some using this query in Google:
{Your Niche Market Keyword} comments +blog site:.edu
{Your Niche Market Keyword} comments +blog site:.gov
These queries will look for sites which have .edu or .gov domains, along with your keyword,the word “comments” and the word “blog”. Some SEOs argue that links from .gov or .edu sites are worth more than .com links; I am not so sure. I think the reason people assume that is because .edu and .gov sites usually have pretty high PageRanks.
4. Here’s a few web directories and dofollow search engines which list (usually) only dofollow blogs. You should still make sure these actually are dofollow blogs, since sometimes they revert back to being nofollow after they get listed:
- http://www.backlinkmagic.com/
- http://www.commenthunt.com/
- http://www.ezbusinessneeds.com/dofollow.php
- http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/
5. An easy way to build backlinks is with content creation websites. These are sites which let you post your own articles and include your own links in them. Usually I espouse keeping any content you create on your own domain so that all queries for your keywords come directly to your site, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to put some ancillary content on sites like this just to build a few backlinks:
- http://www.americantowns.com/
- http://www.thisisby.us/
- http://www.squidoo.com/
- http://hubpages.com/
- http://ezinearticles.com/
Tags: google, linkbuilding, links, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, seo
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Comments
38 Responses to “5 SEO Linkbuilding Tips to Boost Search Results In Google”
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Thanks for mentioning our dofollow tool. We have recently added a brand new database to the search tool which is at least 100% dofollow results for now and we will do checks every now and then to ensure its competency.
Rif Chia
Interesting post, although sometimes I wish all this SEO wasn’t necessary and Google would magically know which pages are the most appropriate. I’ve done some basic SEO to my site last week, but it seems some link building will have to be my next task.
Ah, the myth of Google magic :) Unfortunately, and quite contrary to what they want you to believe, Google is not omnipotent and all-knowing. You do have to help them out a bit … but I can tell you that link building should be your most important priority.
This is awesome, cheers for your help mate! Some good information here, i have found this blog to be very useful :)
Thanks Barry for the tips. Backlinks are the best way to increase not only PR but SERP if you have the right anchor text. My problem is the time it takes to slowly build up these links. I have heard people talk about link buying but I don’t think i would want to take that risk of being banned by Google.
If you are considering buying links (which I don’t condone), then you should buy them gradually so that it looks like you are building these links gradually, rather than suddenly getting 1000 links all of a sudden!
Great tips here -
That’s a great way to find links. Another search operator i use is site:.com + inurl:Blog . This will give you all the blogs on .com domain. You can use it to search .edu and .gov also. Thanks
Another query I use is: “suggest a site” site:edu
I’ve only found a few links this way but they were very high quality. It takes time digging through the results but it’s worth it. Give it a try.
Thanks for all the other tips. I used the 2nd tip and found great links right away.
Another:
site:edu+”suggest a site”
site:edu+”blog”
site:edu+intitle:blog+intext:”keywords”
Barry –
I’ve been doing some power-reading these past 8 months on seo related topics. I have about 40 to 60 client sites to promote/re-promote with decent budgets so I wanted to update my skill/knowledge base. To say i’ve read thousands of blog posts, pdf’s (free and purchased) is no understatement. This is definitely in my top 10 of favorite blog posts. Adding your rss feed to my netvibes page now — and look forward to going forward and backward in your blog for more tidbits of knowledge.
Prob the best new tool / tidbit I found this week was semrush.com (i’m not a party to it; just an anxious seo/webdesigner). Worth a look !
@Rockland – Thanks! Glad it helped you out.
I appreciate the resources. I have been reading up on link building and most people will tell you what to do but not where to do it. Thanx for the links and the great post.
I think you forgot to mention about comment kauhana and easy blog finder. They are tools to find dofollow blogs along with pr.
Mass registrations to social networking sites are relatively unaffective in the automotive marketing and advertisng area
Hey Barry, thanks for the witty thoughts. I would like to mention that it’s getting really hard to track down dofollow blogs and I also wonder how much importancy Google acknowledges to blogcomment-URLs/links. Can you tell me more about that?
Blog commenting is an ongoing process. I have a strategy for blog commenting in a blog post here Proven Spam Free Blog Comment Link Building Strategy. If anyone is new to this or wants a refresher.
your #2 tip, tip from Christian & comment from Cars portal is worth million dollar tips :)
Now everybody appreciated your work , then how can I lag , but I don’t have million dollars :)
I promise your blog entry will rock !
Cheers !
Pretty nice… Hope you can write more, so I can read more!
When you mentioned “they revert back to being nofollow after they get listed” — I agree 101% with you. I use 2 of those directories mentioned and sadly bumped into some nofollow sometimes. Thus I do encourage some kind of “dofollow certified/certification” (or similar). These dofollow blog directories should constantly monitor those blogs listed in their websites — else no one will ever trust them, which would lead to their downfall.
I am testing a twofold experiment with U comment I follow sites to see if people are living up to the claim and also see
if posting works and how. To see how posting a link works I have also created a twofold test. 1) Leave an interesting request.
2) See if the link works.
I am trying to build a list of really good SEO Tools and resources
and am asking you and anyone else to contact me and add some thing useful to the list.
Keep up the good work.
Cool, I’m going to use this on my blog, thanks indeed :D
Fantastic site! I am loving it!! Will come back again (After St. Paddy’s) – subscribing to your feeds also, Thanks.
Good tips; and do u know anything about Apple making their own search engine?
-Jack
@SEO, no, that is news to me if Apple is going to try and compete in the search engine market.
Thanks for the tips and resources. I’m fairly new to SEO. Are backlinks still as important as they used to be? I have been finding that content seems have the most impact on my ranking.
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks
It’s quite funny really…I found this blog whilst looking for blogs to post to! Please don’t be upset! I did read your article in full :o)
The ‘U comment I follow’ tip was a new one for me and I shall be giving that a go right now….thanks….see ya!
Good advice on the search operators. Just to let you know, it looks as if thisisby.us is no more. Maybe list HubPages as an alternative?
I really like the idea of creating articles and submitting it to hubpages and squidoo. Both of these sites are user friendly, have great features to really make your article look polished such as adding pictures, etc. and best of all you can create usually 2-3 links back to your website using anchor text. It’s a great way to create a quick backlink. Once you have the article published, the next great thing to do is to let people know about it. These sites make it easy to add your newly created articles to your Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts.
Thanks for all the tips, I will have to try #3.
Enjoying reading your blog. Hard work always pays off.
I’ve been looking at this feature on WordPress blogs for ages and wishing Blogger would implement it. Followed your instructions and it works a treat!
As a Website Designer, I can achieve great SEO for most of my Clients but obviously in my game, it’s a different story. I’ve come up with a slightly more traditional concept called ‘Offline Optimisation’. It’s surprising how many companies are so obsessed with clawing their way up the engine rankings they forget that there is a real world out there equally abundant with new business opportunities.
Hey Barry. Some good ideas on this post. I also use the SEO Quake plugin for firefox when searching for .edu and .gov blogs, it allows you to sort search reasults in order of PR.
most of the dofollow search engines and lists are never updated ,to find working dofollow blogs its better to do all the work manually for example explor inbound links of other sites and check them with firefox nofollow extension
Great tip on the .edu and .gov links mate! That’s plain brilliant right there! I’m going to give some of these a run, cheers!
I would like to say thank you for sharing this information. Especially I like most your .edu and .gov links search term.
Thanks for sharing those tips, dofollow search variables are a nice commodity to own. Great post.
Thanks for the info~
It’s interesting that blogs first started out as a way for people to express their opinions on their chosen subjects (at least that’s what I thought), but now it has turned into a networking tool with this dofollow and nofollow debate.
But I guess business is business, and I’ll go with dofollow.