Most of the time people build links to their websites, they just tend to go to some blog and start commenting on dialy basis. Or they use spam bots, even worse.

In this case there are two options: 1) 50% of your comments get filtered as spam, because they are just “so good”; 2) They get approved but lack (backlink) value, i.e. you didn’t comment on the right blog.

Finding a blog

All you need is a blog with decent search engine rank and visitors. Or is it? Search engines will always count for high quality links, that come from sites related to your topic. So make sure this blog you choose is relevant to your site.

The domain also counts. Getting a mindable amount of backlinks from an .edu domain is always a good thing. Your site will be considered more useful your average competitors.

Building backlinks

Does that blog has a “recent comments” tab? Make sure you’re always there. Comment on dialy basis.

Comment on pages that are keyword-rich, don’t have more than 20 comments, and have, perhaps, a minimum Page Rank of 0. That means it has been already indexed by Google. If the page is located on a popular blog, then it should rank fine in search engines.

Getting traffic

Leave a comment that stands out. Don’t just say “nice” or “great article”! Be constructive. Be relevant. Be interesting. Most visitors follow links under your names, because of curiosity. You have to provoke them into reading and expecting more to read.

How to do that?

A blog that is less relevant to your site, but closer to your interests is a bigger help rather than the other way around. This way you will be able to leave a comment that includes your personal oppinion, experiences, etc.

Smart commenting really works: if you have to build a PR2 page through blog-commenting you will have at least 100 links pointing to your site. That is really good, but imagine now that each one of those links brings you one or two visitors per day!

Comment with those rules in mind.

First you’re gonna need the All In One SEO Pack. If you have trouble uploading and activating the plugin see this video.

Once you’re done with those two steps login to your blog, go to “Settings” and from there to “All In One SEO Pack”. What we’re actually after here is to change the <title> values so that they are more keyword rich and SEO-compatible.

Title Tags

Here is the title syntax we are going to follow:
Website Title | Category > Subcategory - Item

Below you can copy paste those values in your plugin settings:

• Post Title Format: %blog_title% | %category_title% – %post_title%
• Page Title Format: %blog_title% | %page_title%
• Category Title Format: %blog_title% | %category_title%
• Archive Title Format: %blog_title% | %date%
• Tag Title Format: %blog_title% | Tags – %tag%
• Search Title Format: %blog_title% – %search%

Also, check all the “noindex” options below and “Autogenerate Descriptions:”.

SE-friendly URLs

Last thing to do is to tune your URLs to be more Search Engine-friendly. While in the settings section, switch to the “Permalinks” tab. There you will find various options for URL formatting.

By default your link depth shouldn’t be more than 2 steps, which means:
www.root.com/folder1/folder2/

While if you are running WordPress for a blog it’s not a problem to use the default year-date formatting. For any other projects I suggest experimenting with the “Custom Structure” option. It allows you to type-in your variables, thus forming a new URL structure. If you don’t know which ones to use exactly consult with the All In One SEO Pack settings tab.

Here’s what I used for one of my sites:
/products/postname/

Note

Switching to those options takes no more than 10 minutes. And it is always worth to spend some time on improving your site’s structure. Don’t underestimate small settings, because they can make a big difference.