Blogs & Blog Comments - A subset of Link Building
These great tools act as duplicate websites that are extremely easy and free to set up. All you need is some content, not even very good content, and you’ve got a great “Second site” for the search engine to follow your links to and from.
Ever since Google bought Blogger.com, Googlebot has paid a lot of attention to what’s happening in “the Blogosphere.” Search engines still love to spider Blog content more often than other types of websites, since blogs were invented to be easy for SE Spiders to traverse in the first place. A unique feature of even the free blogs like Wordpress & blogger is that you can set them up to automatically “ping” certain Search Engines or even social bookmarking sites to request that the spider comes out for another visit every time new content is added.
However, the hype about blogs is mostly overrated now. At first it was well justified, and then a method of website marketing called “Blog and Ping” was overused in early 2006 by most of the Internet Marketers of the time.
It involved making tons of blogs with almost no content in them except a link to their website, and then setting them all to ping immediately… This caused Google to hold an emergency war council and now the Ping feature is only marginally better than not at all.
Much like Forum Marketing, commenting on other people’s Blogs is a great way to build incoming links and also network in your niche.
Finding blogs that are on your niche topic is as easy as going to Blogger’s search at: http://search.blogger.com, to a great tech head’s site called Technorati: http://technorati.com, or directly to Google’s whole web Blog Search at: http://blogsearch.google.com.
Once you’ve found a blog that is on your topic, I recommend bookmarking it and the others you find into the same folder so you can watch them from time to time.
What’ you’re looking for is a question that you can answer. If you simply make a posting that sounds like an advertisement, they you’ll be spamming the blog, and surely the blog’s owner will delete it, and may even ban your IP address. The trick is to answer a question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution. You want to show off your expertise without sounding too arrogant, and of course you want to get a link in. Always offer help and advice, and only market yourself when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.
The real benefits of this method are long term, as you want to be found by both SE Spiders and humans alike, talking authoritatively on your niche subject. No one blog posting will bring in tons of visitors, however, and you aren’t going to find the ‘ripe’ questions out there every day.