Grassroots marketing is an essential part of an online marketing strategy. Commenting on blogs is one way to build your link strategy and eventually get better link popularity in search engines. Recently I launched a website and focused my initial efforts on posting to related blogs commenting and adding my URL and desired anchor text for my website. The results were good as the new site quickly jumped to 300 visitors per day and continues to get a steady flow of traffic. Here some things you should know when posting:
Comments Are NOFOLLOW
There is a tag built into most blogs that instruct the search engine not to follow your URL in essence not giving you the link credit you may think you are getting. This is not great for you but if it is a high traffic site, you will get a steady stream of traffic.
Top Commentators
As you comment on the blog, eventually you can hit the Top Comentators list where your links are followed and based on your anchor text, are given the search engine popularity credit. If the site has a good pagerank, this equates to good value for you saving the costs of purchasing a text link on the site.
Summary
Search out the potential related blogs in your industry. If you see they have a Top Commentators section in the sidebar and they have good traffic / pagerank, consider actively participating on the site in hopes of making the Top list.
Popularity: 71% [?]
You all probably heard by now of the huge ramblings going on over at Digg about the HD key post being pulled from the site because the company is a sponsor of one of the founders properties. From there the users retaliated by digging every post related to it so it hit the front page. It got so bad that Digg actually shut down the ability to post a new story.
A few of the bloggers out there took the opportunity to try and get some traffic by quickly creating a post about the HD key and posting it to Digg. Sure enough, some of the blogs received a steady stream of visitors for the little time their posts hit the frontpage.
The moral of this article, be creative and constantly look for mainstream issues to write about. In the end it’s what hits the frontpage of Digg. Based on your blog, keep a close eye on what’s happening and take advantage of any opportunities related to your blog that people would want to know about. Then Digg it up and see what happens.
Popularity: 61% [?]
Search Engine Optimization is and always will be an important aspect of an online marketing strategy. I recently came across a new study released where they asked 37 of the leading SEO experts the most important factors of search engine ranking.
The study asks about the main strategies of SEO, they rank the importance of the factors on a scale to 1 to 5. The questions also include some of the controversial elements of SEO. Each element is given a rank and comments from each of the 37 experts is included.
Summary
A majority of the top factors are in the areas of link building both from external inbound links, as well as internal linking within the website itself. Aside from the keyword in the title tag factor, the important factors are all around linking strategies.
I won’t bother summarizing the rest, this is a must read for anyone serious about search engine optimization. Take the time and read the Search Engine Ranking V2 study.
Popularity: 62% [?]
