A while back I wrote Two Dozen Ways to Get Backlinks where I simply listed 24 ways to get backlinks. As you may know, especially if you've spent any time here at all, there are just a few ways to get organic traffic to your site. One of the biggest ways is to get a lot of links back to your site.

One of the best (easiest, most effective, and free) ways to get backlinks is through making comments on blogs. Now, these aren't just any comments, and if you do this right, not only will you get more backlinks, but you'll get some direct traffic, too!

In a perfect world (we'll call it "Bill's World"), you would browse websites and blogs and make comments whenever you felt you could add to the conversation. Ideally, when you did make a comment that the site owner approved, you would get a link back to your site so that people reading the original blog could visit your site if they liked — or were intrigued — by your comment.

It's sort of a "comment club," where people making intelligent comments are recognized for their contributions and people just looking for a backlink or — worse yet — making silly comments that are inflammatory, offensive, or just plain stupid, don't.

Commenting on blogs is really a win-win-win. The publisher/owner gets a conversation going, which serves to bring more people in the conversation as well as getting return visits to see how/where the discussion has gone; the commenter gets people to visit his site and know more about him (plus, he gets the link), and the readers get to soak it all in and maybe even enjoy the experience.

A few years ago, Google muddied the comment waters by making up this attribute called "nofollow," which caused a tissy in the blogging community as well as the SEO community. It was Google's intention, I think, of making the commenting system less SPAMMY (there was — and still is — a lot of that). The idea was that Google's search bots and algorithm would not follow the comment link and would give it little to no weight in its ranking.

(This is highly convoluted stuff. Bottom line is Google caused a lot of confusion with this and WordPress and other blogging systems took Google's lead and made the "nofollow" attribute the default.)

Lots of folks will tell you that it's not worthwhile to comment on "nofollow" blogs, as they're called. I disagree: Your comments will still "count" as a backlink.

You may ask, "Huh?" And my answer would be, "Uh huh."

The evidence shows that some of this "link juice" still passes, even on a "nofollow" blog. Not that it really matters.

You still get the link. You still get the direct traffic that comes as a result of somebody clicking on your name in the comments. All is well and good.

There also is the notion that you ought to pick roughly equal numbers of  "no follow" and "do follow" blogs to comment on, as this practice looks far more natural to the search engines than just going for backlinks from "do follow" blogs.

How Comments Work

The standard commenting system, employed by default by WordPress, is one where you, as the commenter, type in your name, email address, website URL, and text for your comment, like so:

When your comment is approved and published, your name will be the anchor text to your site, as such:

See the blue text up there? The anchor text, billspaced, contains a link back to my site.

Now, you can get a little fancy and rather than typing in just a name, you could type "Joe the Plumber" which will set your backlink to use your keyword (if you're a plumber, of course) or you could go a bit farther with "Joe the Columbus, Ohio Plumber."

These tactics, if used judiciously, can result in a better backlink than your standard name. However, this tactic could also backfire because the website owner could decline your comment submission or — worse yet — mark it as SPAM if he uses one of the anti-SPAM comment plugins in WordPress (Akismet is the one I use and I highly recommend it if you have a WP blog).

There are some other neat plugins that blog owners may use. CommentLuv is one that is fantastic and one day I may actually install it here. I really like it and it's one of the blog attributes I seek when I want to get some backlinks from blog comments. There's also an extension of that one called KeywordLuv that lets you — even encourages you — include keywords in the name field (as in the examples of Joe the Plumber above).

There is one other WP plugin that site owners employ, and that is one of the many variants of "top comments."

Ways to Find Great Blogs On Which To Comment

{{{4.95}}}I don't necessarily use these methods often, but they are definitely effective. I generally just browse around for whatever topic I'm currently writing about — or have just written about — and contribute to the conversation and I use the URL of the article I just wrote (CommentLuv makes this easy because, by default, it picks your last post as your URL for your backlink).

I am going to show you several ways to find good blogs to comment on. Basically, we will be looking for "footprints" that these commenting systems/plugin leave and once you know them, you can simply use Google (in the examples below) or another search engine to find them.

(Remember — I cannot say this enough — make value-added comments. Add to the conversation. Say something intelligent. Please.)

Method 1 — CommentLuv

In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:

If you want to find all the CommentLuv enabled sites, just leave out the keyword. If you want to look for these types of blogs with "internet marketing tools" as the keyword, it would look like so:

Method 2 — KeywordLuv

In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:

Method 3 — Top Comments

In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:

As always, there are numerous variants on these methods — feel free to modify them as you like; share them here in the comments if you find something especially worthwhile / effective.

Method 4 — Comment Kahuna

One final method I use to find good blogs on which to comment is actually a tool. It's called Comment Kahuna (just click the link and you can download it), which is free.

One Final Thing

When I do make a comment that I find is later approved and is "do follow" I bookmark the site. These are sites that I go back to when I set up another of my own sites for which I need to build backlinks quickly.

Once you know the "footprint" of the various commenting systems, you will be able to easily make comments to get valuable backlinks.

Please, however, make relevant backlinks that add to the conversation. Do it for the blog owner, but do it for yourself, too (no need to get tagged as a SPAMMER).

Tying It All Together

When I start a new site, I always employ this system: 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks

It's my "proprietary" system (big deal, nothing earth-shattering here) that I use to get my site's content indexed quickly, get it ranked highly as quickly as possible, and get traffic flowing to it in a matter of days rather than months.

Next up: Article Submission