Another option you have is to look for blogs about your web site's topic. You will already probably know the most useful ones in your field of expertise. Go to those blogs and read some of the posts they have published. If you are lucky, there will be some kind of widget that shows you how many readers they have on that blog for their RSS Feed or email system.
Large numbers are a good sign as that means a lot of people will read the blog and it probably has a good ranking in Google. Read the posts that are relevant to your topic and if you can, write a comment which shows that you know more about the topic. Also, if possible, make a new suggestion or correct an error in the article.
Don't write comments such as "I really liked this post", "Thank you for this information", or even "I really like your blog". If you write comments such as those you won't get any interaction with the blogger in question and you don't add value to the discussion. Such comments will get deleted or labeled as spam. When I get comment links such as these, I remove them as they add null to zero information for other visitors and they are clearly there just for link building. It won't work that way, and if you are outsourcing or want to outsource this kind of link building, here is a warning, make sure you state in your contract with these people that blog and comment spamming is not allowed!
If you don't add that clause, they may start commenting in your name, linking to your site (well, you paid them to do that…) with the same remarks over and over again. What happens next is that bloggers will ban you from commenting on their blogs, and in the worst case scenario you will loose a lot of credibility in your community. People are sometimes better informed than you think and a mistake like the one mentioned above will cost you more than money alone.
So, if you start commenting, ask yourself:
- Do I have something of value to add to the conversation?
- Will people read that comment?
- How effective will this blog be in sending me traffic?
Keep those in mind, with more emphasis on the first point, and you will do fine.
As I said before, commenting is a great way to create your own incoming links. But how do you find more relevant blogs to read and comment on? First of all, do a search for blogs about your web site's topic. You can use http://blogsearch.google.com/ to find the most recent blog posts and see if the blogs it finds fit your web site's topic.
Technorati is of course the best place to look for blogs.
Go ahead and use the option search the blogosphere.... From the results of this initial search, you can filter based on several options. In the first selection list you will find options such as Search Posts, Search Blogs, Search Photos, and Seach Videos. The second selection list allows you to filter based on entire post or just tags. The third option is the one you really need to set and there you can choose to filter on a lot of authority.
This option means a lot of people are linking to that web site/blog and it will probably get lots of traffic and do well in the search engines. Those blogs are the ones you want your voice to be heard on and remember if you are going to comment, make sure it is a useful one.
What you need to do after finding the blog, is to really check out the site. In some cases there might just be one post about your web site's topic on that blog. And you really want it to be on topic all the way!
Two other blog search services you can use are:
Both are set up to bring to you the most recent results like Google does but they have something extra. You can learn about trends as Icerocket has a trend tool and Blogpulse has its trend search option.
Using those trend tools will give you more insight on which terms are "hot" at the moment and growing. If you combine that with the blogs you just found, for your keywords, you could have a winning team.
We looked at alexa.com in the chapter about analytics and I told you we would be back later. Alexa is also a good tool to find web sites related to your own topic and check their influence in the blogsphere. Now is the time to head back to the blogs and web sites you have recently found and want to comment on. Check their ranking in Alexa and, most importantly, check the incoming links.
Use the tool that Alexa gives you to find a few web sites that you can really relate to. In my case I wanted a site about "landscape gardening" and I found www.thegardenhelper.com.
Now, The Garden Helper does pretty well in Alexa and is a very ancient web site, dating all the way back to 1998.
The site is not my kind of design and you cannot comment on the site itself, but they have a forum on which you can help and leave some traces. But what we are really interested in, from Alexa, are two items from this info page:
- Sites Linking In: It is on the top line with the traffic rank numbers and will show you other web sites that are linking to this site. You should check some of them to see if they have blogs where you can participate in the conversation. You can also ask them to link to your site if the topic is related and you think it would be of benefit to their visitors.
- Related Links: This tab will show you other web sites that are also on the topic of site you found. Sites such as gardenweb.com, have several subdomains including voices.gardenweb.com—a blog where you can leave comments.
As you can see finding relevant sites that give you the opportunity to comment, can be a cumbersome task. However it is worth the effort, especially in your initial link building. You might find that searching for blogs about the topic of your web site is a lot easier than it was for this gardening site. It maybe difficult also. It depends on the keywords you are going to target and the popularity of the topic of your site.
Commenting on a blog takes time and effort to do it the right way. Another way to comment is to link back to articles on a relevant web site and hope that they will show the trackback to your web site. If they don't show the trackback, you have at least provided your visitor with a valid link and you can hope that the webmaster of that site may link back to your site over time.