A very common way to get backlinks from other blogs to your site or blog is to post a comment on a blog that has similar content to your site or blog. For example, if you had a site about coin collecting, you would find a blog about that subject and then make a comment post about the subject of coin collecting or something relating to coin collecting. For the best SEO effect, your post would include an anchor text link back to your site.

Commenting sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? It is actually. But, to get the most benefit from blog commenting you will want to do a few important things.

• Post comments on the highest PR blogs you can find.
• Post comments on blogs that have a similar subject matter than your site or blog does.
• Make sure you post comments using anchor text links.
• Make sure your anchor text link anchor text are relevant or the same keywords you are targeting on your site or blog.

Considering all this, the task of blog commenting gets a little more complicated doesn’t it. Especially the first two items. Talk about doing some work!

Now, there is a tool available that can help you with the tough stuff. That is - finding the highest PR blogs for your targeted keyword. The tool is called Comment Hut. Enter a keyword search term and Comment Hut will hunt down any relevant Wordpress blog, TypePad site, Drupal site or Live Journal site with your keyword ranked by PR (if you choose)! Then, click on the links to the sites returned and proceed to leave a targeted anchor text keyword link comment on any of the sites that you want links back to our site from. Using Comment Hut is extremely easy and what a timesaver.

A trackback is another method of getting a backlink to your site from a blog. It differs from a comment in that the trackback is used to elaborate or add to an existing post on another blog other than yours. In a sense , the trackback associates blog posts on different blogs or it notifies another blog that you have published an entry that references it.

When you trackback, which is the permalink to one of your posts appears on the other blogs post. Blog readers will see your link and may follow it to your blog to find out more about the subject matter being discussed. So, you end up getting targeted traffic.

If you need or want more detail on trackbacks, read an article about Blog Trackbacks which explains things in more detail.

Next time I’ll give you some valuable tips on reciprocal linking and may even extend this series out with some linking strategies using Press Releases.

To your success,

Greg

Tags: blogging, blog trackbacks, blog comments, linking strategies, links, linking

When I speak of Directory Submissions I am referring to manually submitting your link to a Search Engine directory for the purpose of getting spidered, indexed and for obtaining backlinks to your own site. When you manually submit your link to a search engine directory and you do it in a manner that is natural or semi -automated that appears natural, you will eliminate the chance of tripping the search engine into believing that something about your submission or your site is un-natural.

If you are an Adsense Publisher, a benefit of manually submitting your link to the search engine directories is that you may get more value for a click on your site. This is because Google can tell the difference between natural site indexing methods and more forceful means like mega blog and ping. Google will reward the naturally indexed site with a higher value on a click versus a site that may not be so natural because they are trying to protect the click through to their clients websites. If your site is detected as using un-natural indexing or linking methods Google may penalize your site with lower value per click via smart pricing. Concerning blog and ping - it still does work - but it has to be done low key.

For the short time I have been an internet marketer, I have quickly realized that most of the hot ticket strategies to get sites indexed and/or get mega traffic in a flash come and go quickly because the search engines catch on and end up penalizing your site by either de-indexing it or reducing the value of a click from Adsense. So, I have started to play more by the rules, knowing that doing so will bring higher rewards down the line and my sites will stay around in the index longer.

This brings me back to directory submission. I consider it a must. It will bring the search engines to your site naturally and from there more traffic will come. You can get a better click value from Google Adsense. The only problem with Directory Submissions are that they require a lot of work. Think about submitting your site to 250+ directories using different titles, keywords and descriptions. Now what if you had 20 sites, or 50? You can see that you would be quickly overwhelmed just having to do all these submissions.

Well, thankfully there are options to help out. One option is to use a tool like Directory Site Submitter. The main thing this tool does is to automatically or manually (via a button click) fill out the Directory Submission online form containing your site’s information, its URL and your personal information (like email). All you have to do is fill out a captcha or something similar and then click “Submit”. This tool contains directory listings for over 400 directories and more are added periodically. The directory listings are sortable by Pagerank as well, so you can target higher PR sites first if you like. So, you load up several of your sites information into the tool and when you navigate to the correct page of the Directory site your info is automatically filled out! Its a real time saver.

Another option is to outsource Directory Submissions to a reputable company. I recommend using the company that is affiliated with SEO2020, since I have used them in the past and they provided excellent service.

If you choose to manually submit your site to the Search Engine directories yourself, either one site at a time or by using Directory Site Submitter, be careful how you do it. Only submit to a few sites per day. And vary the anchor text link, title and description of your site information. Directory Site Submitter can help you do this because it provides you fields for multiple keywords, titles and site descriptions.

My next post will discuss getting backlinks by blog commenting and trackbacks so stay tuned!

To your success,

Greg

Tags: directories, directory site submission, indexing, Adsense, search engines, search engine directories, backlinks

Article submission is a very common, widely used and easy way to get backlinks - and traffic to your website. If you have been marketing online for a while and you have your own site, you know that getting other websites to link to your site is a must if you are to reap any benefit from organic search engine traffic. Article submission provides an easy and often no cost way to get some of these backlinks and the traffic that goes with them.

So, you have a website about a certain topic thats monetized to make some money. To get backlinks, start to write some articles around the subject matter of your website. Make the articles as relevant to the topic of your site as you can. You don’t even have to write the articles yourself - you can use a service like Need-An-Article.com which has teams of article writers available to write small, medium or large articles based on your requirements. When you write your articles, use keywords that are close or even the same as the keywords your website targets for the traffic you expect to receive.

Another option for article writing is InfoGoRound. This service provides you access to a ton of custom written “private label type” articles that you can use as is or edit as you see fit. I use this service myself and have benefited greatly from it both in time and in quality of content. IGR, as it is called, is a subscription service but if you submit just one article to the site per month that service is free! IGR also comes with some awesome tools and extras as a bonus for subscription. Its worth it to you to take a look.

OK - I suggest writing several articles about the subject matter relating to your website. Then, submit one article a week to main article directories like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and articlecity.com. If you can spend a little cash, I recommend subscribing to the article submission sites Isnare.com and/or Articlemarketer.com and periodically submit your articles through them. Articlemarketer.com offers an extreme value for mass article submission to many directories. Using a service like this allows you to spend more time writing and creating and generating ideas versus the grunt work of manual submission. All in all, if I had to pick only a couple alternatives for article submission, I would lean towards Articlemarketer.com and Ezinearticles.com. Both of these sites are well known for their exceptional and valuable service.

You can also use an article submission tool to automate article submission as well. A tool like the one available at ideal-article-submitter.com can provide you an extremely inexpensive way to semi automate article submission. This particular tool is setup so you have to manually enter some information when you initially submit an article to a given directory. This is a safeguard to prevent the article directory from rejecting your article due to automated submission.

When you submit your articles two things will happen. The first thing that will happen is that you will get a link back from the article directory itself from the article you submit. The second thing that will happen is that your article will get picked up by other webmasters looking for content and when they place your article on their site - you get a relevant backlink. Once your site has relevant links from other sites linking back, search engines will rank you site and send more traffic your way. Thats what its all about.

One more thing - a resource called turn your words into traffic really helped me see the light with respect to writing articles to generate targeted traffic. The author is a well known article writer and columnist and offers unique methods for generating traffic from the written word - your articles!

Next time I will dive into directory submissions - another way to get relevant backlinks for your websites for that ever so fleeting targeted traffic!

To your continued success,

Greg

Tags: articlemarketer, article marketing, article submission, links back to your site, backlinks, targeted traffic

First of all, I want to wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year. I know I am looking forward to making progress in 2007 as I have firmed up my own business plan from what I had been doing in 2006 to improve my online income. One of the things I will be doing is building good ole fashioned, high content, well linked content sites. And that brings me to a subject that relates to that very well - how to get backlinks to your site for targeted traffic.

If you have a website and want to get free organic search engine traffic to it, you need to have backlinks from other websites pointing to your site. Not only do you need the backlinks, but you need those links to be subject relevant to the content on your site. Search Engines are ranking sites and sending traffic based on relevancy now, so you must do whatever possible to get the relevant backilnks pointing to your site.

So how do you do this? Here I will spell out the top four ways I use to get backlinks.

1. Article Submission - writing articles is one of the best ways to establish content relevant backlinks to your website. When you write an article and publish that article to an article directory like ezinearticles.com, the directory posts your article on their site for others to read. The article you submitted to the directory should have a bio area where you can describe your site and also provide up to two anchor test links back to your main site, or even better an internal page of your site. Keep in mind that it is better to use anchor text when linking as opposed to just providing a URL to your site’s page.
2. Directory Submission - submit your website to online search engine directories like DMOZ.org. Directory submission is often an overlooked tactic by many webmasters when trying to come up with backlinks to their sites. Thats because there are many, many search engine directories and submitting your site to them is a time consuming daunting task that is best left to outsourcing or some type of semi-automation.
3. Blog trackbacks and commenting - commenting on other webmaster’s blogs is a good tactic for getting backlinks. But, there are a couple of things to consider. One is that your commenting is not geared towards spamming the blog. There are many tools out there that you can use that automate posting comments to blogs and many times those tools are abused for link spamming. This type of blog posting should be avoided entirely. Another thing to consider is that you need to find blogs to post on that provide similar content to what your site or blog content is about. Remember relevancy?
4. Reciprocal Linking - this type of linking has some positives and some negatives depending on your approach. To do reciprocal linking properly, you need to consider only relevant website links whose content matches well with the content on your own site. And the number of links needs to be kept at a minimum. Don’t go out and try to get as many links ans you can and stuff them on your site while not even considering if the link subject matter is relevant or not. Also, avoid using link directories on your site if you can. When you exchange links with another site, the best way to do so is in the form of a published article with anchor text links pointing back to you. The links need to have exposure, so an article or a link on the top page of another site is the best way to go.

Of course there are many other ways of getting backlinks to your sites like press releases and posting in forums. But the above outline my favorite techniques.

To keep it interesting, I will be posting more detail on these techniques one by one in the next few upcoming posts to this blog. In addition, I will provide some review information on some of the tools I use to get backlinks to my own sites - so stay tuned!

To your success and a Happy New Year!

Greg

Tags: backlinks, reciprocal links, targeted traffic, blog comments, press release, article submission, directory submission, search engine, organic search engine traffic