Using Blogs and Forums for Link Building

Link building isn’t just good for your page rankings, it can also help in a variety of other ways such as brand visibility. You can use other blogs and forums to build your links and here are a few tips for doing the same.

Choosing the right blogs and forums for link building

For your link building efforts to be effective, you need to first choose the right blogs and forums. This means blogs and forums that are relevant to your site content. The first thing you should know is that there are blogs that allow comments from readers while there are other blogs that don’t allow the same. There are blogs that will allow you to post a URL within your comment while there are others that won’t. What you’ll need is a blog that allows both.

Many people will also take into consideration the page rank when choosing a blog. A high ranking page will mean greater visibility and therefore a higher possibility that the comment will be read. This doesn’t mean that you should not consider low ranking pages. You may achieve more success with a low ranking blog if it has a more targeted readership. There are various tools that you can use to find out the rank of a page. One such tool is the Google toolbar which can give you a possible PR value for the forum or blog. Firefox users can also use the SEO Quake plug-in which will provide you with the page rank along with lots of other information.

The content of your comment matters

This is a common mistake made by those who only post comments for link building purposes. A comment that doesn’t add much value to the reader could have several negative consequences. For starters, there’s a good chance it will be flagged as spam and not get posted by the owner of the blog or get deleted by forum administrators. At the end of the day, the owners of the site have the last on what does and what doesn’t go on their page. This is a problem you may have to deal with even when you post good quality content. Secondly, even if your content slips through, the readers themselves will be able to see that it is spam or that it doesn’t add much value to them and thus will simply not follow the link. This means you will not gain much traffic from the link. Take your time to create thoughtful comments that readers will be interested in reading.

Make it a habit

Commenting on a blog once and then moving on to other things is not likely to do much for you. Instead, you’ll want to make commenting on blogs a habit. This will help you to build a relationship with the owners of the blog and the readers as well. Even if you can only manage a few every day, this will help to build your reputation over time.