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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This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Web 2.0 SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.