SEO Blog

It might not seem like the most obvious link building tactic, but other blogs and forums provide a great opportunity to really give your website a boost.

Most will offer you the opportunity to include a link back to your site within the author’s name or indeed within the comment itself; whilst many may be nofollowed, occasionally you’ll find a site with decent PageRank that will allow the full strength of a link to be passed on. Where this happens, make sure you pounce.

But what do you write in one of these forum posts or blog comments? Well, the best thing to do is simply respond honestly. Don’t write the turgid kind of ‘completely agree’ response that offers little value or imagination. Read the post, see what the forum members say and write something that will add to the conversation, not detract from it entirely.

Most comments will be monitored anyway, so if something appears to be deliberately targeting a link and nothing else, more often than not it won’t get accepted. This is another reason why you should take some time over what you write. Mindless keyword strewn drivel is just going to get your message booted. As will including dozens of links using key phrases targeting male fertility products; this won’t even get through the most basic of filters.

How do you find forums or blogs to comment on though? Well, the first place to try is Google. Have a search for some terms in your industry, maybe even suffixed with the terms ‘blog’ or ‘forum’. This should bring back some interesting results that should give you food for thought. Over time you’ll develop an understanding of which sites you like to read and comment on, which ones accept your links and where you can go to find more.

It can take time though, particularly if you are in a distinctly niche market. So you may have to be patient, particularly when it comes to finding sites that offer followed links.

Why are followed links important?

Followed links help to give you page strength. Most sites today won’t offer this verbatim within their blog comments or forum posts, but the benefit is that you will get a certain amount of the page strength directly from the site through your link. Therefore, if the page in question has a PageRank of 3 or 4, you can get a lot of benefit just from a simple link. The followed link implies authority and will provide significant boost to your site, at least in the eyes of Google at least.

As for the name you use, well as we all know, using an optimised phrase within a text will help to really anchor the keyword for any page. This is a given. However, the problem lies in whether you choose to risk using this for your name or within your message. In the most part this will get detected as spam unfortunately. Site owners don’t want to reward spam, and whether your message is valid or not, could choose to remove it as a consequence.

One thing you might consider is using your real name followed by the keyword. So for example, you could put your name down as Ben Norman | SEO Expert. That is less spammy and could slip past moderators easily enough.

However the important thing for your link building work is to simply get that strong link. Whether it has decent anchor text or not, your site will benefit. So do the hard work, have a look around and comment on any blogs or forums that you find.