Increasing Your Site's Search Engine Optimization

Plenty of gurus will tell you to post comments on other people’s blogs in order to create more links to your website – and thus increase your search engine optimization.

Today I read a long article that said it doesn’t necessarily work. On many of the sites where you might post, the links are automatically designated as “no follow,” which means Google isn’t supposed to use them. If they increase the traffic to your site, you’ll benefit, but the link itself won’t help.

So what you’re doing is adding content and increasing the SEO on someone else’s site. That’s a nice thing to do, but you want to increase the content on your own site.

What to do?

Take a page from Clayton Makepeace’s book… Write the first few sentences of your message and then insert a link that readers have to follow to get “the rest of the story.” Then (well, actually first) post the entire article on your own site.

The link still won’t give you more Google juice, but the added content and the added visitors will.

Mr. Makepeace does this with his e-mail letters, and it has always annoyed me, because when you have a slow Internet connection you don’t want to have to click and go somewhere else. That means his first sentences have to be VERY interesting or I don’t click.

But now that I understand why he’s doing it, I guess I’ll have to curb my annoyance. At least there’s a darned good reason.

Something else I learned – Google is the only one that pays attention to “no follow” so your ranking on Yahoo and others will increase when you keep posting those links on your blog comments.