As you’re probably aware, two important factors that Google uses when “deciding” how high to place your site in search engines are the number of incoming links to your website and the quality of the sites that those links are coming from - in addition to on-page factors. On average, links from educational (.edu) sites can mean a definite boost in your Google rankings, since these sites are generally universities and other prestigious institutions (high quality in Google’s eyes). Here are some tips that you can use to get links to .edu sites quickly by leaving blog comments:
Note: You’ll need Mozilla Firefox in order to use the strategy I’m about to show you. You can download it for free at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox.
Step 1. Identify “dofollow” .edu blogs in your target niche. By “dofollow” I mean blogs that allow visitors to leave comments with a “valid” (again, in Google’s eyes) backlink to the commenter’s website. You can do this by going to Google and typing in the following:
site:.edu *your target market*+blog
Of course, you’d type your actual target market in between the asterisks. For example, if your target market is advertising, you’d type *advertising*. If you can’t locate a blog for your specific target market, try searching for a more general term. So say, If you can’t find advertising, try marketing.
Now using this technique, you’ll come up with a list of blogs that you can comment on. Here is where two free Firefox add-on tools will come in very handy :)
Search Status, which will allow you to identify which blogs use the dofollow attribute. If a blog doesn’t use the dofollow attribute, you’ll see a pink highlight around the comments section. If you see this pink highlight on a particular blog, you’ll know to simply skip that one, since commenting on it won’t give you the search engine boost you’re lookng for.
SEO for Firefox, which, among other things, will allow you to see the Google pagerank, Alexa rank and other qualities of the blogs that show up in Google searches. In general, you want to comment on blogs that have a higher Pagerank (3 and above), as a higher pagerank will mean that the blog has more authority in Google’s eyes, and a link from one of these sites will have more “juice”, so to speak. Install both of these tools as add-ons to your Firefox browser. Don’t worry, detailed instructions are on the sites - It should take less than a minute to install each.
Step 2. Once you’ve identified blogs that you’d like to leave a comment on, your next task is to leave RELEVANT comments on the blog. Don’t just say “Hey, great post! Come check out my blog http://www.ispammedyou.com”. You want to leave a relevant comment that actually contributes some value to the topic at hand. The best way to do this is to take a minute or two to actually read the post and find out what the author’s talking about, then offer your thoughts on the subject.
Step 3. Most blogs will have a comment form with a box were you can enter your website url, so all you have to do is enter your url in the box and you’ll have a backlink pointing to your website from a high ranking .edu site once the comment is published by the blog author.
Doing this on a couple of .edu blogs a day can be a powerful way to build quality backlinks to your website. As time goes on and you build more and more of these links, Google begins to see your site as an “authority” website - why else would you have so many important educational sites linking back to yours? Your reward for having so much “link juice” will be higher rankings in the search engines and thus, more traffic to your website. Give it a try!
