Perhaps one of the easiest ways to build quality back links and drive actual traffic to your page quickly and effectively is the blog comment. Granted, it’s time consuming and takes some effort, but it’s not hard to do and it can be very targeted traffic if you do it right. Here are some basic guidelines to ensure that you drive traffic and build your brand, not spamming and driving people away from you.

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1. Find Some Blogs

First thing’s first ? you?ve got to find some blogs to comment on, and probably on a regular basis. You can use Google in a crafty way to find the niche blogs that will most benefit from what you have to say (and more importantly, the site you have to link them to). Simply put in your niche followed by (and this is critical) quotation marks ?notify me of follow-up comments?. What kind of pages have verbage like ?notify me of follow-up comments?? That’s right ? blogs. Take a perusal of the first few returns and identify which ones are good ? you’re looking for pages that are:

• Indexed. Otherwise, who cares?
• High PageRanked. Even links back from a one or two are good, but you?ll find some that will give you 5 or 6 ? obviously, spend some more time with those.
• Active. If you can open up a dialogue, so much the better.

Hint: To discover the page rank of a blog, download This Tool. Then you will see that listed on the top left or lower right corner of your browser everytime you visit a new website.

Keep track of your blogs through a document list or a special blog-bookmark folder.

2. The Art of the Comment

It’s show-time. You?ve got to remember that you’re not just throwing out a link and running away ? you’re engaging in the discussion and providing insight and resources to help the discourse. You can be provocative, just don’t spam! Your blog’s admin and even the readers are super-sensitive to un-thoughtful comments that are clearly just a bid for traffic ? this is an area that they want to have open discussion in, not get sold a product. That being said, you’re going to sell them anyway ? you’re just going to do it in such a helpful way that no one is going to mind.

Once you?ve got things situated, you can’t mess up the opportunity to optimize your post for the search engines and also for the readers ? if you’re saying the right things on the right blogs, you?ll generate traffic from the actual readers, not just from the quality backlink that you?ll have built. Use your keyword in your name, being careful not to look spammy. You?ll probably want to set up a separate email account for your blog posting ? it needs to be active so that you can confirm posts, but you?ll want to be able to scrub it or even delete it down the road if it gets too jammed up. Finally, you want to make darn sure that you?ve got that link back to your website in place. Either reference it directly because it’s helpful, or include it in your signature.

3. Bonus Blog-Finding Tip:

Search engines LOVE sites that have .gov and .edu domains. They’re obviously full of credibility and can’t possibly be anything other than good quality content. I can’t help you with the .gov domains, but here’s a great tip to score some very high PR links from educational sites. You can do an advanced search in Google and limit your searches to a specific domain ending. So, the trick we showed you earlier to hunt down niche blogs across the internet can be refined to identify student, school and college blogs across the country with killer .edu domains. They’re still blogs, you can still post to them, but they’re worth their weight in gold. Or go comment on some of These Blogs, and These.

See an example of one of my blog comments here. I used the anchor text Customized Diaper Bags. I just entered it as my name!

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