≡ Secrets of Blog SEO: Conversation
One of the saddest so-called SEO advices is “don’t pass link juice” to other sites. Many bloggers still use “rel=nofollow” in their entries to prevent their page rank from dripping away. This is one of those selfish acts many webmasters do to please Google. And the WWW revolves around Google (?!)…
What these webmasters don’t know is that people don’t care about their “rel=nofollow” tags. They follow. And because they follow, the PageRank doesn’t matter.
When you place a link in one of your blog entries, follow or nofollow, you send traffic to another site. And this is what the other site really needs. Not fake rankings, not “link juice.” Websites need people to survive. A site without visitors is a dead site. It’s a monologue.
Knowing this, the best SEO advice for bloggers would be: follow. Give people what they deserve.
Liz at Successful-Blog has a great entry on how to create a strong community of readers for your blog. And if you didn’t know it by now, the community is the lifeblood of your blog. The community feeds your blog with content (their comments actually help your pages rank higher in the search engines because they add relevancy to your entry, they complete your ideas and they offer you a broader view over what people need, think, believe). Also, the community will give you the links you need to rank in the search engines for your most profitable keywords. So give a link and a “thank you” and move on. The search engines are not the only traffic channels you know, and for blogs they are by far not the most important.
The best example of how to give back to your readers you’ll find at Make Money Online with Snowboardjohn, who was kind enough to give me some link love and exposure from his blog, just because I posted a comment there. My first on his blog. And I didn’t even know he is having a comments competition.
I find the idea very good. Encouraging your readers to make meaningful comments is a great way to improve the content on your pages. Then a simple thing as a link to say “thank you” will make the reader come back for more. It will probably make the reader say “thank you” by linking back. And then the circle is complete. Something happens. You are no longer an island. What better SEO advice do you need?
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October 4th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
[…] (including moi) here’s a good post from The Dog Yard (via Yvonne at Lipsticking) about SEO and blog linking. A good educational post we can all use. A short snippet: One of the saddest so-called SEO advices […]
October 11th, 2007 at 3:27 am
Great advice and a helpful post! Thanks!
December 25th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Thank you for your post. Permalink structures or a strong seo technique when used to deep link through web directories. Some web directories link http://apex7.com offer free deep links with every submission. Use these deep links to build link juice to your internal pages of your blog.
April 30th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Great post, very informative. I agree with your in certain circumstances. If you have created a community that you can moderate and that gives you great feedback and ignites thoughtful discussion, then you can reward them with Do Follow links but be careful to moderate them strictly. However for most sites, doing this would just invite a huge increase in comment spam, which will hurt your blog by linking to them. It really is a catch 22. I think to start, you have to No Follow, then if your community is built well enough, change to Do Follow with strict regulations.