That’s good news isn’t it? So what does it mean? What does it give to you and your blog?

Well, basically it just means that when you comment on any articles on this blog, the link that you provide is actually getting indexed by Google and some juice is passed over to your blog.

Normally when you comment on any blog, the link is “nofollowed” which means that they will not be traced by search engine spiders, other than Yahoo and some insignificant ones. Now, DailySEOblog is an exception, so if you want incoming links to your blog, all you need to do is write sensible comments on the blog (You are reading t anyway).

So commenting on DailySEOblog has two benefits now.

1 - Get some google juice from the no-nofollow links to your blog.
2 - Get some traffic to your blog from the “latest post” link featured from your blog on the comments.

Why this new change ?

Well, I know for a fact that there are readers out there on RSS readers and other places who read Daily SEO blog on a regular basis and there are some smart and loyal ones like Niyaz who regularly post sensible comments on the articles.
Now, it’s perfectly fair for the rest of them out there not to comment on DailySEOblog, because they don’t get anything out of it. They read the articles and that’s about it. Why should you comment……..? And now you have an answer. For a backlink whenever you need to.

I also realize that this would be good news to the spammers. Well, got to live with it anyway. I’ll be selectively moderating comments and approving them. If there are more, there will be a time limit put on new commenters, before their comments become no-nofollow.

So if you are a regular commenter, your links get indexed quicker than anyone else. Makes sense? What are you waiting for?

—- UPDATE——
The comments will be selectively moderated and keywords/author names that does not give any idea about the author but in turn looks deliberate to drive google juice to the products will not be approved. Ex:- Pharma, Free software, Online games.
However comments that are sensible and makes sense to the community will be approved even though may carry a not so popular name. Consider this a manually approved comments area.

Here are the best and the top traffic generating keywords tracked for the last month on DailySEOblog.

Many of them are long tail keywords while some are good volume searches and is constantly generating traffic.

All of them are picked form my referral stats. I normally believe in SEOing your site to live searches on Google rather than working towards a fancy keyword like “SEO India” which is easily mistaken for traffic. With these keywords, I get a good amount of traffic each day (see the competition number for each keyword), and I’m happy with it.

First off a clarification. Links aren’t everything that can get you higher ranks on Google.Yes, links can be the most weighed metric, but it definitely is not the single thing that will help you get ranks.

Somehow, there are many people who are adamant to believe that links are everything. These days, webmasters are very particular about link building and some of them have even collected some dirt and dust in the whole process that it annoys you.

By dirt and dust I meant some common misconceptions about link building. Here goes.

(These ideas were collected from numerous “SEO gurus” who claimed that they are “Link building experts” on a couple of Google groups.)

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.
- Directory submission is the secret weapon.
- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.
- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.

It is unfortunate to know that many SEO’s agree to the above and in rare cases even get confused.

- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.

Completely wrong. Aaron Wall might have referred something along these lines in his SEO book (which was released years earlier mind you.), but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it in these times of SEO 2.0

Sure the volume of links are a great metric that will push you forward but, more than the number it’s the quality that matters. 100 links from different directories is not good while 10 contextual links from blogs can cut the competition.

- Directory submission is the secret weapon.

Did you know that Google keeps an eye on the most popular directories and keeps them off the authority brackets? Aaron did not mention it in his book, as a matter of fact. Directory submissions are only a push factor to your ranks. I think a well crafted mix of backlinks from some real good contextual text and some “respected” directories will make it an irresistible combo while backlinks from directories alone is futile. 

- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.

Last day I got contacted by a link building expert on chat. He asked me if I had a PR4 website, I said yes and he demanded the URL (To test if it’s really PR4). On approval he told me that he’ll give me a backlink for which I have to reciprocate another. I denied. He offered me two links for one. I denied again to which he replied - “OK, I’ll give you 3 links”. On denial again he got frustrated. He asks - “Why? I’m giving you three links from different sites and that also theme based !! You won’t get a better offer than this.” :-p

The funda was that he had a network of websites in his belt and every time someone offers a link he goes for a three way link exchange.

Three way (or for that matter any link exchanges) will not work. They are simply a waste of time.

- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.
Sure it does. But what is the meaning of themed websites? One version is that websites which belong to the same category as your’s are themed websites.

Perfect! It is true that getting links from a site that is similar in content to your’s make sense. But I believe the “theme” thingy should come down to a more refined level. You should talk about the paragraph of text surrounding your link to the “themed”, the keyword proximity and keyword density is what should make your link themed. So, rather than finding a site based on it’s category as listed in the blog directory, it makes more sense to hunt links in similar or related content.

So there you go. Getting links to your site is not a mechanical process, it’s largely natural. As the SEO 2.0(more on that in the next posts) rule goes, a compelling content is your biggest link bait. And of course you can cement together your site strength with other factors such as directory submissions and link building etc. But solely relying on artificial methods to link building is retarded.

This has come out to be an one-stop SEO guide for all you wordpress users out there. I’m not sure if I’ve covered all the topics but I’m sure that these are(in fact all) the basic, essential steps all you wordpress users out there should follow in order to make sure that you have your wordpress blog on steroids. I’ve kept in mind all the SEO metrics possible that will make your blog SEO friendly.

The idea is to - “Put your wordpress blog on an SEO Auto pilot mode and keep writing articles that has a very high possibility to make it to the first page of Google, every time you publish them.”

The process of blogging on WordPress can be dissected in to three parts.

1 - Creating a powerful SEO friendly custom wordpress theme.
2 - Using all the power tools to catapult you ahead of others.
3 - Writing killer articles that are SE optimized.

How to create a custom SEO optimized, unique Wordpress theme?

Some people may argue that Wordpress is SEO friendly by itself, therefore you don’t really need an SEO. If you ask my opinion on this I’d say, both right and wrong. Right because, Wordpress is SEO friendly. Wrong because every Wordpress blog is SEO friendly.

Image this, everybody has a Bazooka to fight, so what makes the difference? Only the guy who has a better one will stand out. Similarly, only the guy with a unique custom wordpress theme can win over the others.

1. Selecting a SEO friendly wordpress theme for your site.
Check this first. Your theme holds a lot of importance in deciding your search engine ranks. Really. There may be sites that get away with it using a stupid theme or no theme at all, but remember, those sites are supported most of the times by other SEO factors that a common blogger may not have. Your theme, it’s layout structure, number of images used, code validation all should be taken into consideration while making a selection. Here’s a detailed structure.

- Select a theme with a SEO friendly layout. So that crawlers don’t find it difficult to find the content on your pages.

- The content should be clearly highlighted on the pages.

- The HTML and JavaScript code if present should limit to the first 15-20 lines of the source code. The first part of the source code should predominantly contain the content of your article.

- The whole HTML code of your pages should be completely valid. Use W3C Validator tools to check this and follow the recommendations accordingly.

- There should not be any/or very less flash and AJAX content on your template. If at all they are present, let them be in the footer/sidebar or below the fold. I don’t recommend it for the header. Resources - How to do SEO on flash enabled website, How to SEO with AJAX.

- Header of your theme is a good real estate for SEO. An image is fine, but in my experience I’ve seen that if text is placed in the header (either alone or combined with the image) with the necessary importance given (clue), it weighs more than the other text on your page. So select a theme carefully.

- When you select a theme , do a simulation test on the demo site. A simulation test is one that gives you an idea of how your pages would be seen by crawlers. In the search engine simulation test, if the results show the text featured on your theme demo, it means the theme is good for search engines. There are some themes in which we can see the text visually, but in a simulation test, no or very less text appears, keep away from such themes.

2. On site Optimization for Wordpress
On site optimization for wordpress is one of my favorite topics, simply because there is always a new concept that emerges out of the blue.

• SEOing Wordpress Title Tags - A very often repeated topic this one. Still I find that many bloggers don’t implement it. In this tweak, the best option is to use the permalinks in the <category><post-title> format. Although, I find that adding the date option impresses Google. It also helps the users to find how old the post is.
  Resource - Title tags and Wordpress SEO
• Interlinking your blog posts is an excellent way to spread the Google juice evenly.
• Optimize your categories - Categories on wordpress is an excellent resource for SEO, not many people have discussed this if I’m right. But there are some tweaks that we can do to optimize it for the search engines.
• SEO’ing the footer text - This is yet another SEO factor not many have discussed, but something that I find has a good scope. It may not work well for all themes as some themes eve completely ignore the footer. But if you use some wise tricks(clue) to give it the right kind of importance, it will help you get that extra mileage for your keywords.
  More onsite optimization tips or wordpress can be found here.

3. Put your wordpress blog on steroids.
A wordpress blog is SEO friendly by default, but adding some power tools to it can make it 10 times as effective as a naked blog. In fact, there are a lot of power tools available online, and many of them are scrap. The wise strategy is to pick the best ones that really fit your blog.

Here are 7 power tools that will catapult your wordpress blog from ordinary to a super blog.

• 1. Headspace Wordpress SEO - This is an extremely good plugin for Wordpress that I found very effective. It is even better than the much hyped All in One SEO plugin. It is a bit hard to manage this as there are more options in it, but this is far more effective than All in One SEO.
  2. Google XML Sitemaps - Sitemaps are an essential for your wordpress blog. You can either create a manual one here or use this plugin. The plugin creates an automatically updated sitemap whenever there’s a change in the site, like an article or a page edit.
  3. Homepage Excerpts - Duplicate content is a big issue on Wordpress. The same content is shown on one or more places on Wordpress and hence the chances of duplicate content and supplementary pages are more. But using this plugin will reduce the chances of duplicate content on wordpress as the homepage content is cut short.
  4. Social Bookmarking - Getting your sites content to travel and propagate is a key factor to getting popular. And what more could be better than social bookmarking? This is a best social bookmarking plugin I’ve seen in the recent times and the X number of them that’s been released.
  5. KB Linker - Extremely useful plugin. You know that internal linking is one of the best way to spread the Google juice and increase the authority and importance of pages. This plugin lets you to select a keyword and whenever there’s an occurrence of the word in your articles, a link can be automatically placed to the keyword. Use it to link to your articles and it increases the internal linking drastically.
  6. Kill supplemental results - There are more instances on Wordpress that increases the chances of supplemental results than you thought of. Homepages, Archives, articles the chances of getting supplemental results on a naked wordpress blog is higher. Use this plugin to decrease the chances in autopilot mode.
  7. Bunny’s Technorati tags - If you are looking for backlinks and traffic from Technorati blogs, you must have this plugin. I’m not a Technorati enthusiast, so I’ve not used them on this blog, but yes, I’ve tested it on other blogs and it works fine.

There are lot of SEO plugins available at the moment, but the truth is that you don’t have to use them all simultaneously. Many of them do the same purpose but some do one task better than other. In the above list, you can safely use all of them together without any clash while serving the purpose of SEO’ing Wordpress.

Now, that more or less completes the “Ordinary to Super blog” power tools that you need. But more importantly there are a few things that you should keep in mind or keep away from.

What you shouldn’t do to SEO your wordpress blog.

1. Say NO to Link Exchanges.
   Link exchanges are a waste of time. Unless you have a product that’s difficult to sell and get inbound links to like a P standing up thing, you really don’t have to do a link exchange. The links you acquire doing a link exchange is not really worth the effort as a one way link. So focus on your content and let the links come in because you have awesome content.
2. Avoid Wordpress themes that has lot of JS code especially in the first 50 lines.
   The first few lines of your blog when scanned by a crawler, is checked for vital information about your blog. Whether you have meta description tags or not, you need to have some information in the first few lines (speculated it’s 30, 50 and 100) of your code.
3. Do not tag one article in more than one category.
   It’s not a good idea to tag your article in more than one category. It is in a way fooling your readers and increases the chances of duplicate content. More info here.
4. Do not display the Archives links on the homepage OR use the Archives section.
   Archives increases the possibility of duplicate content. Either don’t use them or use the page specific meta tags to no follow/no index them. Headspace plugin can handle all this.
5. Do not use plugins that clash with each other.
   In the frenzy to get everything and not lose all, you install all the plugins only to find that nothing works out. I can give you an example. Using Headspace and Google XML Sitemaps with All in One SEO is not a good option. Especially if you are controlling the Robots.txt from Headspace, it tries to control Robots.txt, while All in One SEO too tried to write it. Which calls in a clash. So make sure you know what you are doing when installing plugins that serve the same or similar purpose. The best way out would be to have an in depth look into all the details and monitor what’s happening.

I hope I’ve covered all the bare essentials to SEOing your wordpress blog. If you follow the above steps, I can guarantee you that you’ll have great platform to blog. Now, it depends on what you write and how good you write that will decide how your ranks are on the SERPs. That’s something you should learn yourself, I don’t think anyone can train you on it although can give you pointers on concepts like keyword research and copy writing.

P.S - You’ll find numerous articles on the net googling for “SEO wordpress” but many of them were written long ago and does not reflect the new ideas and concepts pf the trade, which is what made me write this article. Hope it helped.

Free SEO tools are always popular. Just like Aaron who manages an array of free SEo tools on this domain, there are new guys coming up as well.

When Aaron is dabbling between Keyword analysis tools and meta tag descriptions, which are basic old school seo, there’s this brand new link analysis tool that’s come up. In fact, there could be better and powerful tools around, but this one is packaged well. Take a look here.

What it does.

- It checks for a sites total number of backlinks.
- Also checks the total unique anchor texts and
- Total text
- The pages in your site sorted by Google Juice strength.
- A chart showing the types of links (follow, nofollow etc)

- Most popular anchor texts in your incoming links.

The backlinks are arranged by their Page Rank, the Anchor text used, the number of incoming links to that site , whether the site is good or not and the strength of the link.

I’m not really sure how the last two metrics work. “Link strength” and “Linktype”. Probably link strength checks whether the link is a weak one like the one placed in a sidebar with no contextual text around it or not.

Anyhow it’s a really poerful tool with lot of data assorted in to one single digestible capsule form. The only problem is that it may take a while to crawl and assort your links especially if you have many incoming links. But it’s worth the wait.

Thanks Praveen.

TNX.net is a one stop place for both Advertisers and Publishers who’d like to make some quick bucks online. Well, the idea is pretty clear. If you have a blog, you can advertise it on other publishers network at cheap rates and if you are a publisher you can earn money by displaying others ads. Simple as that.

The TNX, website itself has a very user friendly layout and design, where everything is explained at every step. You won’t find it difficult to use it at all. And they have made the registration process too very simple. You just need to give in the minimum details and you’re done!

At the moment, TNX has 41075 users with 31844835 links in the whole system. Pretty impressive!

So how the whole system works on is based on points. You get 2000 points right when you sign up itself. Then for each ad displayed on your site/blog, you get points at TNX and you can redeem it later as money from them.

TNX also has an affiliate program that is easy to step up. Earning money will be an automatic process, once you have the referrals coming in. The pay out percentage is 13.3% for direct referrals which is impressive.

Setting up a TNX publisher account is easy too. Just sign up, install the TNX code on your website, then wait for ther approval which normally happens in less than 2 days, then display ads on your site (max 4), ge the points and redeem them as money form TNX. Pretty simple isn’t it? You can sell the TNX points to the TNX system or other TNX users also.

There is a cool application called income calculator, which on giving in your PR, number of pages and the total number of ads that you are going to display, will give you the amount of money you are likely to make. This is a nice tool just to get you an idea of how powerful TNX is.

For Advertisers, creating an account and finding millions of pages to feature their ads is easy.

The sidebar gives quick access to starting an Ad Campaign. Thanks to TNX’s well-organized Ad Campaign wizard, creating and ad campaign is easy as breeze. You can set the parameters for the sites where your ads should appear on: website categories, geo-location, number of Yahoo Backlinks (YB) and Google Page Rank.TNX even provides a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and your spending plan (in TNX points)

On the whole, TNX is a nice place to find and sell ads, and make some money or get some great ad deals for cheap rates. Using it is very easy as they’ve take good care in ensuring that the whole process is kept simple and user friendly.

Before writing this article, I had two thoughts. Should I be really telling this out to the world? The trade secrets that is. As a matter of fact, off-site optimization is the trump card up every SEO’s sleeve and so is mine.

It is my favourite tool, and experience has proved that out of all the weapons in my armour, off-site optimization works best that anything else. But, I thought I should let you guys know some of the secrets in off-site optimization, after all information and knowledge is to be shared. So here I go, hope you enjoy it and make good use of it.

So what is off-site optimization?

Off-site optimization includes all the strategies an SEO implements other than on the website, to increase the chances of ranking higher.

So that means everything except title tags, meta tags, keyword density, internal links, layout/design etc fall into the brackets of off-site optimization.

What are the factors in off-site optimization?

Off-site optimization consists of many factors that directly and indirectly affect your rankings. Having said that, they are not non comprehensive.

The Incoming links

I’m sure all of you are already aware of this. The incoming links to your website is the biggest offsite optimization factor that directly affect your rankings. Incoming links are of various types based on their relevance and importance in SEO. Though they are all essentially the same in code, based on where they are located, their weightage and placement, each of them carry a different weightage.

1-A sitewide incoming link,
2-A contextual incoming link
3-A homepage icoming link

A sitewide incoming link, is one in which an incoming link is repeated in every page of a website with the same anchor text. Examples are links placed in teh sidebar of a blog, footer of a website, navigation bar of a website etc. Essentially, a sitewide link will carry more importance than any other type of incoming link, as the link is more relevant. But there are problems with it as well.

When the link is placed at areas like the sidebar/navigation bar/frames, there is no textual content near the links most of the time, since the code is seperate for the sidebar or frame. But yes, if you can manage to get a couple of authority sites giving you sitewide links, nothing else like it.

A contextual incoming link, is the one that is placed in a relevant link, among all the other textual content on a webpage. Examples are the normal links a blogger would place in an article. Even though such links carries a good amount of weightage, and increases the relevancy of your webpage, it will not help you beat your competition, if you have a few of those. You need to have a healthy (not huge) number of contextual links to prove your point on the SERPs. But Google gives much importance to a relevant, contextual link than a sitewide link. When considering competition, it all comes down to numbers and equations.

A homepage incoming link, is obviously the link that is placed at the homepage. It carries a certain level of importance and when combined with other factors of the link provider can work wonders. But again the number factor will play a huge role when deciding your ranks, as a single homepage link from a single site may only give you a push of two-three positions.

So mostly, though the different types of incoming links carries their own importance levels, it’s ultimately a mix and match of these factors that gives you the results. Like when sometimes several single homepage links fail to give you the desired result, a single sitewide link may do the trick! Again, the competition is the factor that decides what is the equation that has to go into it.

The nxt most important factor in off-site optimization is the quality of the site that links to you.

A true quality website is not always the one with a high PR. Clear that mis conception off your head first off. Many a times, SEOs refer to sites as “authority websites”. Well, authority websites are the ones that have already managed to get into the Googles good books basically. One peculiar feature of authority websites are that they are listed at the DMOZ directory. Of course, that is not the litmus test for an authority website. Every website cannot find it’s way to the DMOZ directory after all. But yes, many of the top authority websites would be there on the human edited directory - DMOZ.

But I have a different take on the authority websites theory altogether. I don’t think that authority websites are those that are on the DMOZ or those that have a high PR.

To me, authority websites (in the context that they will be a sure shot way to boost rankings), are the ones that have quality backlinks, and have been around on the internet for quite some time. Sadly, all the authority websites in my list are not on the DMOZ.

Some factors that may be taken into account when deciding authority of a website are the number of incoming links to that website, the number of outgoing links, the amount of information rich pages, the number of pages listed on google, the number of supplementary pages, the age of domain etc.

The moral of the story is that, out of all the seo methods, on-site optimization may fail, but if there’s one thing that will give you an edge over others, it is indeed off-site optimization. So forget the header tags, and H1 tags go for some serious link building my friend, that’s were the soul is.

Vishal has a doubt on linking strategies.

Google does not show any backlinks for his site - www.b2cjewels.com. He has submitted articles in forums and directories, he has also ensured good interlinking of pages.

So he’s wondering why the links are not showing up.

The second question is - while interlinking pages, is it better to link with the complete URL (www.example.com/url.htm) or just the pages - ..url.htm?

Well, Vishal, you have backlinks indeed. Search for google blog search and you can find 8 links to your site.

Seems like you have attempted to backlink from lot of expired domains or spam sites, I really don’t know how this could’ve happened, it could be spam robots who picked up your URL, or had you submitted them yourself? It is not looking good either way.

What you really need to work on is get contextual link from related authority sites. A few of them that comes in regularly will do the trick. I also noted that your site is up from 2005, so it’s high time you had some good quality incoming links.

Now, regarding the internal linking, the types of links you referred to are respectively called Absoulte links and Relative links. Absolute links will carry the whole URL with it while the relative links will carry only the respective correct path. See more info here.

In SEO, I prefer Absolute linking even though both are the same in Google’s eye. But using absolute linking is better because,

• It is easier to manage as there are less chances of error/broken links to appear when moving documents/pages.
• There are more occurrences of your domain name in the code, which is good.
• It is more recognizable to visitors and are likely to bookmark, provided the content is worth it.

So, go ahead with more absolute links, and directory submissions. Bit if you are really looking forward to a solution to your back linking problems, you should try article marketing and more contextual authority links.

These days, importance is given to link building than anything else in SEO metrics. Out of the various factors considered today as must have’s for SEO, link building stands out. At the forums and discussion boards, there is always someone who’s looking for outsourced SEO’s who can work on link building for their site. Many are preferring cheap SEO’s too. Hmm, though it looks murky, I’m not of the opinion that link building should be outsourced to any cheap SEO.

If you take a look around, you’ll see that out of all the bloggers, only a few say less than 10% even consider outsourcing link building. The majority of them handle it themselves. And they are good at it. May be there’s something you can learn here.

1. Link building is not tough as it seems like.
You have no clue why your site is getting a better PR, or a better position. That doesn’t mean that your link building campaigns, if at all any, has gone wrong.
Probably it means that you’re not doing it right. I’ll get to some tips of how to do link building successfully down the article.

2. Link building is not easy as it seems like.
Having said that, it’s not something everyone can focus on. Many of us do a one man job at the site, writing content, tweaking template etc. In between all this, link building goes out of focus and remain down the priority list.

3. Link building is not about commenting and directory submission alone.
Many of us count link building practices limited to directory submission and commenting. Well, honestly that’s only 10% of the whole process. There is a whole lot more in link building. Let’s see further.

Let’s clear some common mis conceptions about link building.

Last, day I asked a question, what are your link building methods?

And the common answer many agreed on was that - Exclusive content and natural linking will help you more than anything else. 

Josh Spaulding says that, since he deals with niche sites, he believes in natural linking though he submits his blog to directories.

Josh is right. If you have a niche site, and if you haven’t marketed in properly, it is highly unlikely that it will get noted by others and hence the link building will be fairly okay while not helping the site much. In such cases two things can help.

1. Directory submission and  2.Social Media Optimization.
If you submit the site to some quality directories, it is likely to get some attention and traffic(Not all does give it, you have to chose wisely).It would help you get some Google juice atleast, again it’s only a better alternative to waiting for your content to get noticed.

Social Media Optimization is the thing! If you are clever enough to create a remarkable(in the right sense of it’s meaning) article, which is likely to get noted by others, then things happen really quick! People notice your blog and favour it with links. Just what we wanted.

Nitin Pai is of the opinion that, natural linking is the best way to get links.

Here too, the uncertainty in when you will get the incoming links and attention is something that will put us off.Again, SMO will help you out here.

Rajan and Mohan is also of a similar opinion. They say that the content itself will bring you links if it’s exclusive.

So what we can learn from this discussion is that taking into consideration, the uncertainty and ambiguity in waiting for the spotlight to feature your content, taking a step forward and creating those killer, viral articles optimized for the social media, would help you more than anything else in building links.

• Agreed that content is king and exclusive content will bring you natural links but optimizing your site for the social media is the right weapon to hunt for links. It’s a fool proof strategy. Waiting for natural links to come is vague.
• Links from commenting does not help you get a higher page rank.
  I heard some one say that he builds couple of links a day through commenting to ensure that his page rank is better the next update. It’s a wrong idea. Commenting on blogs can only bring you traffic, and backlinks on Yahoo and MSN but not Google, unless if the blog is “Nofollow” free.
• Links from forums don’t help you at all.
  I know many of you will disagree with me on this. I can explain.
  Just answer the following questions and you will agree with me.

  - How many links can you gather from a forum?
  - If you are getting signature links at a forum, many others would. Isn’t it?
  - If all of us link to our sites from one single forum (or as many which provides sig links), wouldn’t Google put them all in one bracket ?
  - What’s that you’ll get from a forum that other’s don’t?

  Do you get my point now? From my experience, if you rely solely on forum links, they don’t give you any exclusivity at all. If you know of a forum that allows signature links, probably everyone will. Though it carries some weight, when everyone starts getting incoming links from common domains, they does not give you that edge over others. This is more applicable in the case of sites that fight for positions on the SERPs. For the small time amateur blogger, who just needs an incoming link for the sake of it, it works fine.

So the point here is that, handling link building campaigns yourself may not give you the desired effect because you are not specialized in it. But if you are very clever, there’s nothing stopping you. From my experience, hiring a so called “cheap SEO” doesn’t serve the purpose if you are looking for quality links. Many of them I know rely on forum links, directory submissions and at the most article submission. Beyond all these traditional methods, I’ll rank Social Media Optimization as the right weapon. If you can find someone who’s good at it, he can give you quality links than a cheap SEO. Remember, links are not just about numbers, it’s also about quality. Fifty incoming links from forums/directories is equal to five quality contextual incoming links.

Do you see all those link give away campaigns happening around?

“Subscribe to my feed, I link to you” - “Comment on my post, I link to you” - “Subscribe to me, I give 100 bucks” goes the hype.

Now that he page rank thing is abused, and carries less weight, bloggers are focused on the feed count.

What’s the catch? Clearly, the owner wants to increase his subscriber list and is trying all that he can to pull you in. Fair enough.

But, does it work all the time? Is it a sure shot strategy to win you readers? Can everyone copy the same strategy?

Well, yes and no.
Yes because everyone who wants to increase their reader base or get more traffic can copy it. It does not require any investment or any particular wealth. All you need is a well planned strategy and an attractive “reward” for participants.

Many a times, it’s a linkback or cash. Some bloggers prefer cash while some prefer linkbacks. I think linkbacks works best for grabbing new and young bloggers while cash works for established ones.

No - because the campaign is just a number focused game.

True that you get to increase your reader base (in numbers), but apart from the numbers does it give you real value and quality?

Are these readers likely to read your articles and comment on them regularly? Yes they are. But hey, they would do it even if you didn’t offer them a backlink or money. 

Ethics - Another concerning factor is the blogging ethics part. Running a campaign is not really unethical but sometimes Google thinks that they are. Remember what happened to John Chow, running the “Review me-I link you” campaign..it got a backlash from Google. And anybody who links to John now are likely to be counted as bad neighborhood now. So these campaigns carry a risk of penalty from Google, since they are counted as “artificial methods to get backlinks”. An increasing feed count campaign may not be treated as one, but yes there is some amount of risk as the links are involved.

Bottom line - Loyal readers subscribe to your blog willingly. You don’t have to offer them anything to. The reader base you collect offering a reward is probably second quality. They are not your loyal readers.

Mohsin from Bloggingbits inspired me to write this post. He’s running a “Link giveaway” scheme at his blog, where if you subscribe to his RSS feed, he’s rewarding you with a linkback. Young bloggers who are looking for linkbacks, can try your luck there.