Posts Tagged ‘website promotion’

Leaving Comments on Blogs for Website Promotion

Sunday, July 10th, 2011

In beginner-guides on Internet marketing or blog promotion, you’ll often see the suggestion to find other blogs in your niche and leave comments there. How can this strategy, usually called blog-commenting, help your own website? Is it a good way to increase traffic? Read on to find out.

How Blog-Commenting Can Help You
Commenting on blogs can be beneficial to your site in two ways. First of all, each comment you leave will contain a link to your website (you get to specify the URL when you enter the comment). This means that each comment you leave equals one backlinkto your website. That’s great for search engine optimization. Another advantage is that you’ll be getting those backlinks from many different places, online (different IP adresses, different geographical locations, different domains etc.). This diversity is one of the things that search engines pay attention to.

The other benefit of blog commenting has nothing to do with SEO: People might click on the link to go check out your site. People might simply be intrigued by your comment and want to see what other stuff you’ve written.. You could almost say that you’ll be “stealing” a bit of traffic from the blogs where you’ve left your comments. Obviously, this only comes into play if you leave interesting comments that get people curious about your site.

If a blog uses ComLuv (aka CommentLuv), you’ll even get a link to your latest post, including the post title, displayed with your comment. Especially if you’ve chosen a spectacular or provocative title, this will increase the amount of people clicking through to check out an article.

In summary, leaving comments on blogs can help your Internet marketing campaign by creating backlinks and creating a small traffic stream from click-throughs.

Where Blog-Commenting is Limited
Regrettably, blog commenting also has some drawbacks as a link-building method. As you may know, almost all comments on blogs are tagged “nofollow”, meaning that Google doesn’t properly credit or “follow” those links. This means that having links from blog’s comments sections won’t increase your website’s rank in Google. Although there is much debate about whether Google really discounts nofollow-links or not, it’s safe to say that you’ll get substantially less or even no benefit from nofollow-links. In fact, even a blog’s comments are dofollow, the links you’ll be getting will still be relatively, low-value. Google “sees” that the links are coming from a comments section and that means that they were created by the site owners themselves. This is obviously less valuable than a link created by a third party. Secondly, your comment will usually be one among many, so any pagerank that gets passed will be split up and distributed to perhaps dozens of sites.

And that’s also a problem concerning the human visitors: Comments on blogs that get many visitors are usually “in good company”, meaning there will be dozens or hundreds of other comments. This decreases the chances of people paying attention to your comment and wanting to click through to your own site. On the other hand, less popular blogs won’t have many comments, but neither will they have many visitors. So, once again, you won’t get a lot of click-throughs.

Also take into account that your comment must be intriguing and relevant. If all you write is “Awesome post!” or “I agree. Nice blog!” or something like that, your comment will probably be filtered out as spam. And even if it’s not, no human visitor will become interested in what else you have to say and click on your link. In other words: Good blog commenting takes a lot of time. For it to work, you have to read the blog articles and then write something original about them in the comments. Of course, if you’re visiting blogs because you’re interested in them, this isn’t a problem at all, but if you’re trying to use blog-commenting purely as a website marketing strategy, you’ll soon find that building a few backlinks this way can swallow up several hours of your time.

In summary, the links you get through leaving comments tend to be of low value both in terms of search engines and human visitors..

Blog Commenting Mistakes
As already indicated, you should certainly avoid leaving short, worthless comments. Even if comments like this pass the spam filter (which they usually don’t), they are still a waste of your time and effort. They are also a bit of a slap in the face of the blog author, who tries to create great content and get readers interested.

There are many Internet marketing products that automate blog commenting or even do high-volume blog comment spamming. Of course, you should absolutely steer clear of any software like that, for all the reasons stated above.

Whatever you do, never rely on blog comments alone as your SEO method. While it can be a useful thing to do as part of a larger link-building strategy, it doesn’t have enough oomph to stand up on it’s own.

So, does blog commenting make sense as an online marketing strategy? In my opinion: No. Ultimately, there are many ways to build backlinks that get you better results in less time. Leave genuine comments on blogs if you truly want to interact with the blog owner and the community. That’s the original and still the best purpose of comments sections.

How to Obtain a Higher Number of Advertisers for Your Site

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Advertising is the most common way to have a legitimized website, regardless of your niche. The online world is filled with examples of how websites made it big in terms of revenue by working with the right kind of advertisers. There are many good, content oriented websites that can prove to be great for advertisers, because of their targeted traffic. You can’t expect revenue to start unless your advertisers know how to approach you and give reason to. Targeted advertisers are a step you should take to ensure they are attracted to your website.

Your first line of defense is to ensure a professional design of your site to attract advertisers. Your potential advertisers will use the first impression rule to judge the professionalism of your site. It’s not likely that advertisers will invest in your website if the graphics are poor and the sales letter is out of place they are more likely to avoid you like the plaque. It’s important to remember that most people view the first impression as the only impression they need to make a decision.

Comprehensible Depiction:

Ensure that you’re supplying every little detail that the advertiser requires in order to get to a content ads, purchasing decision, which involves the size of the ads, any constraints like no adult or hate content ads, pricing, what information is necessary from the advertiser, how the ads will be provided, what all information you can put forth, etc. Being clear in your description will make the whole process go smooth; the advertiser can approach you with a made up mind, instead of being in a state of confusion.

Your credibility and visibility within and outside of the broader level is also important. This credibility comes from the site itself and from who’s behind it. Make a good “about me” page for your site where others can visibly see who you are and what you are all about. You also need to have a presence on social media sites like Facebook and twitter so that advertisers can see you on other sites too. Appearing credible and trustworthy is the goal here. In conclusion, from the above article we can clearly see that in order to attract the right kind of advertisers, you should be ready to take the necessary steps. Keep in mind that if your site helps your advertisers get a good return on investment, you won’t have problems generating revenue from your site on the long term.

As a final point, it truly is consistently a beneficial practice to look at your current analytics details and find out exactly where visitors are generally coming from. As soon as you actually discover where your readers are coming from, you can use a  keyword and key phrase research application or Google Keywords to find more keyword phrases relevant to the key words which are currently delivering your existing traffic and customers.

SEO And You

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Improving your rankings in the search engines may seem difficult to understand, and even more difficult to make it happen.  This is definately not the case, however.  There are numerous tools on the internet that can help you find a high search engine placement for your website, including Search Engine Optimization videos, some of which can be very valuable, especially if you are looking to do it yourself, and don’t have the money to hire an outside company to do your seach engine optimization. You need to have good visibility and rankings in the top 5-10 search results for your keywords; or else you will be at a severe disadvantage to your competition.

A great majority of people looking for products to purchase on the world wide web find these products by doing an online search with Google. The number one goal of promoting your website for first page search engine rankings is to attract targeted traffic to your site who are searching for what you have to offer, making a purchase more likely. The better you choose your keywords, and the higher they rank in the natural results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That is why search engine optimization is such a powerful tool.

The major search engines usually prefer (and rank higher) sites that have quality, original content rather than “pretty” sites that are slow to load with lots of flash or whatnot. Your website needs to be tailored to the keywords you wish to rank for - these are phrases that your targeted visitors will be typing into search engines to find your site.

A good goal is to have around 400 words on each page of your site, and while this may not be doable for some online businesses, commerce sites in particular, you still want to have at least a hundred high quality, targeted words on your page. If you are looking to create a high ranking on search engines, this text is perhaps the most important aspect. The search engines like Google, however, need to be able to read your text, which means that your content must be in the HTML language, and not simply graphics.

Linking is another factor that will dictate where you are found in the search engines. This, some say, is the key to determining where your site is found in the search results. Pretty much all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the types and quality of sites that link to you, and also that you link to.

If you search for “free link popularity check” in Bing, Google or pretty much any search engine, you can easily find out what sites are pointing to your page. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or if the sites linking to you are not of good quality, you should explore the possibility of starting a link popularity campaign. Basically, this means searching for quality sites and asking that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires looking into the quality of the domains you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites can not only help boost your ranking in the search engines, but it also can help make your site be seen as an authority site.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, or look online for information on how to  improve search engine rankings, you might be surprised at how much information is available, and how simple it can be.  You might also want to check out this site showing you how to take advantage of  link building services  in a painless manner. There is a plethora of information available on internet marketing, and if you plan to make a living through an online website, you will have to either do your own search engine optimization, or pay for a professional to come in and put a campaign together.  Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more high quality traffic will come to your site, and the more sales you will make online.