Posts Tagged ‘Alexa’

How To Get Your Blog Comments Approved

Saturday, February 26th, 2011

Blog commenting has long since been a highly used method for building backlinks to your website. Actually, it has been used and abused in the past so much that most blogs and search engines have completely discounted the value of comment links in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value. Many blogs do not link out. Most have the nofollow attribute applied to comments and a great number of bloggers have turned off commenting all together.

Still, however, commenting on blogs can have great value if a blog visitor uses it for what it was intended for, as a means to encourage dialogue and idea exchange. Here are some steps that will help you to get your comments approved if you are a blogger or webmaster looking to comment so as to drive traffic and grow your indexed backlink count.
Find The Right Blogs. What good is commenting on a blog that doesn’t teach you about your niche or is not related to you niche in a direct or supplemental way. The purpose of commenting on blogs is to interact with both the blogger and their visitors. If you have a website about a certain subject, find blog about that same subject or related subjects. By doing so, odds are you will find targeted, search-engine-driven traffic consisting of like-minded surfers looking to learn and interact. This is a great way to draw visitors to your own site and build your reputation.

Alexa Rank. Finding blogs with high levels of traffic is very important. One metric that you can look at when looking for blogs with high levels of traffic is it’s Alexa rank. Simply go to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo and enter the URL of the site in question. Do this for all of the sites you are researching and comment on the ones with the lowest Alexa rank. In this case a low Alexa rank is a good thing because it means more traffic.

Use Your Real Name. The days of spamming blogs with keywords are over. There is really no need to use keywords in your comment or as your name when commenting. Visitors who read your comments should know your niche simply by the genre of blog that you are commenting on. This is not a complicated point. Just use your real name.

Add Value To The Article. If you want to get your comments approved, you have to add value in one form or another to the article. This means, of course, reading the article and learning something from it, provided there is something to be learned. Think of an insightful comment that actually adds to the discussion. Or, if you have a question about something in the article, ask it as your comment. This is a great way to get comments approved and solicit interaction.
Use Proper Grammar, Spelling And Punctuation. Nothing be-speaks a lack of professionalism more that poor grammar, spelling or punctuation. When you comment on blogs, you are not texting a friend on their iPhone, you are acting as an ambassador or representative for your company or website. These types of things stand out and can make the difference between getting the click and just getting skipped.

NoFollow Or DoFollow? As mentioned before, many blogs have added a nofollow attribute to comments on their blog. This has been an unfortunate necessity due to the massive amounts of spam comments that have over-run the internet. However, there are many blogs that have removed this now-default setting so as to encourage dialogue and reward legitimate commenters. I have done this to my own blog and have been happy with the results. Do spammers attempt to comment on my blog? Absolutely. Do they succeed? Absolutely not. Probably 90+% of the comment attempts on my blog are spam. Almost all get blacklisted, never to have the privilege opened to them again. With respect to the nofollow/dofollow debate, of course dofollow is better because your site receives search engine trust and reputation but do not avoid commenting on blogs that have the nofollow attribute applied. A nofollow link is far better than no link.

Avoid Software And Outsourcing At All Costs. Many of the comment attempts on my blog have been made using automated software. The bottom line with respect to commenting software is this. It is nothing more than an arms race between those who use it and search engines. There is a race between the software that spams unprotected blogs and the de-indexing of these blogs by search engines as well as blog owners who have given up and thrown in the towel by turning off commenting or deleting the blog entirely. At the same time, comments placed by software are almost never related to the subject, even when commenting by keyword. They stick out like a sore thumb and are a great way to get blacklisted as well as ruin your site’s reputation on several fronts. Much of the same can be said about outsourcing comments. Remember this. No piece of software or hired commenter can or will give comments linking to your business, website or blog the care and consideration that is required by this SEO and networking tool. You can use a hammer to hit the nail on the head or break a windshield. The choice is up to you.

Bonus Tips On Finding Blogs To Comment On. You can use Google to find related blogs. Below are few examples:

“Add comment” Your Keywords”Post comment” Your Keywords”Write comment” Your KeywordsYour Keywords “leave a comment” / “leave comment”Your Keywords “Notify me of follow-up comments?”+”Submit the word you see below:”Your Keywords “Remember my personal information” + “Notify me of follow-up comments?”Your Keywords “Notify me of follow-up comments”Your Keywords “This site uses KeywordLuv”Your Keywords “Enable CommentLuv”Your Keywords “You can use these tags”Your Keywords “Powered by BlogEngine.NET”Your Keywords “Allowed HTML tags:”Your Keywords “top commenter”

Blog commenting can be a great way to drive traffic if it is done correctly. The benefits of networking and building your reputation conceal great rewards that are discovered only if you play by the rules.

Retrieved from “http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/how-to-get-your-blog-comments-approved-3692263.html”

Go here to see the original: How To Get Your Blog Comments Approved

Incoming search terms:

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog/Website, download, Link Exchanges, msn, Online Marketing, Online Networking, SEO Methods | No Comments »

Alexa Toolbar – The Ultimate Internet Tool

Monday, July 27th, 2009

There are numerous tools available on the Internet to assist online businesses. A valuable tool that you should use is the Alexa Toolbar. Even better, this tool is free.

Alexa Toolbar

Founded in April 1996, Alexa.com was designed to provide an interactive web navigation system. The most impressive part of the platform, now owned by Amazon.com, is the free Alexa Toolbar.

First released in 1997, the Alexa Toolbar is known as the “B.S.” detector for Internet sites. With over 10 million users, the toolbar tracks how people use the Internet and turns this information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. For instance, Yahoo is ranked as the number one most visited site on the Internet.

So how do you use this tool? First, you download the Alexa Toolbar as follows:

1. Go to Alexa.com.

2. Click “Download Alexa Toolbar” at the top of the page.

3. Click “Install” on the next page.

Reload the page you are viewing and the toolbar will appear across the top of your browser. The tool provides you with valuable information regarding any site you are looking at, including your own. It tells you the traffic ranking of the site compared to all sites on the Internet. The tool also provides you specific traffic information for the site and lays out sites that are similar to the one on your screen. Instead of making baseless assumptions regarding how “good” a site is or whether it is successful, you can use the Alexa statistics to get a better idea. If any company approaches you claiming they have a lot of traffic, you can just pull up their site and review the Alexa statistics. This allows you to verify who is receiving a significant amount of traffic and who is feeding you a line of “B.S.”

Let’s look at Google.com using the Alexa toolbar. Load Google on to your browser and click the #3 number in the toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar information for google shows:

1. The site is the 3rd most popular site on the Internet. Yahoo is No. 1.

2. The site takes .8 seconds to load, which is very fast.

Next, click the “see traffic details” link on the page to dive into the site statistics:

The site shows consistent traffic through the year, maintaining a number 3 position. 214,00 out of every million surfers visit the site, which is an excellent “reach” rating. Each visitor views approximately 5.4 pages on the site, which means that users are working there way into the internal pages of the site. This is always good news for a site.

As you can see, using the Alexa Toolbar system can provide you with specific information regarding web sites. The next time you are contacted by someone claiming they have millions of hits or are considering advertising on a site, you can use the Alexa toolbar to get an objective view of the site.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Alexa | No Comments »