Do you know any celebrities? Have you thought about using them to help your search rankings? It’s a bit of an odd idea but I think it can actually work – and on several levels. Here’s why.

You’ve probably heard by now of people selling tweets or followers. For some time now celebrities have been generating additional income through this and – I’d imagine – to a fair bit of success.

Not only does the tweet get published to thousands – if not millions – of followers and can bring you many clicks and followers, it also acts as an endorsement from that celebrity. And I think that’s why so many people are turning to celebrities to push their brand or cause, whether it’s for charity or for financial gain through business.

We know that celebrity endorsement works – that’s why we see Michael Parkinson selling life insurance policies, George Clooney selling coffee machines and Davina McCall and Cheryl Cole advertising hair products on the television.

Taking this back into the online world, with Google Plus becoming more important as a social tool – as well as an SEO tool – getting high profile +1′s from authoritative celebrities is one way of publicising (or even initiating) endorsement quickly and encouraging people to click your site within the search results.

Let me explain. Those that are logged in while searching and have a Google Plus account will see which of the people they follow have +1′d your site. If that celebrity is one of those that are being followed this will appear in the search results next to your listing and the chances of click-through and potential sales potentially can increase massively.

Chosen wisely, the celeb will also have close ties to your industry and with a wide reach this could be a very powerful move for your online SEO campaign.

Not only that, but through the association between your business and the celebrity you might also see people publicly talking (via social media, forums and blogs) about the decision made by the famous face and it all contributes to creating buzz. In turn, this could quickly lead to links pointing to your website helping to push it up the search results.

Previously, a celebrity endorsement would be printed on leaflets and magazines and put on radio and television adverts and took time to be publicised, yet with social media it is almost instant and reaches out to those that are already ‘connected’ with the celebrity. And now that these +1′s appear within the search results, the connection is made obvious to those looking for products and services similar to what you provide – a connection that could work really well.

The idea is very quick and potentially very effective when it utilises social media, particularly powerful if there’s a good overlap between the celebrity and your audience and can be exploited as often as you like. It can also work for highly authoritative and well-known figures within your industry.

As for the cost… please contact your nearest celebrity.

Building links is sometimes a tedious task, often having you spending hours with little return. Finding sites within your industry doesn’t always make it any easier. But there are a few tips that can help you find better sites within your niche for you to approach for a link to yours.

In this post I look at a few techniques I’ve been implementing recently to make sure I find a good number of links each time I work on a site. With all of these link building techniques you don’t need any special software or knowledge, just a site you want to build a link for, some knowledge of the industry and some time.

Here are some of the searches I perform on a regular basis when I build links for any one of my clients.

To find blogs relating to your site, search:

• keyword “leave a reply”

To find blogs that you don’t have to register to comment, search:

• keyword “leave a reply” -”You must be logged in to post a comment”

To find directories within your niche or that have a category relating to your niche, search:

• keyword “directory”
• keyword “submit a site”
• keyword “add a listing”

To find resource/links pages, search:

• keyword inurl:links
• keyword inurl:resources

To find a page that talks about your niche, search:

• intitle:keyword

To find a particular type of domain, search:

• keyword inurl:.com
• keyword inurl:.gov

These are just some of the ways you can find sites and other links within your niche or with pages that discuss similar services or areas of your industry and are useful in helping you find quality links to your site.

If you have any other methods please comment below, as I’m always on the lookout for new ways of finding great sites and potential links and I’m sure many other regular readers are too.

It struck me recently, after spending hours and hours (maybe days or weeks) link building over the past few years, that link building is very much like your weekly shopping when you’re on a tight food budget.

Maybe this isn’t so much of an informative topic than my previous articles, and I know it sounds like an odd comparison, but let me explain.

Ok, so for your monthly shop you’re on a budget. You need to get the all the food you need on a regular basis but money is tight so you need to make your budget stretch further.

After a while, you get to learn which shops have the best prices for certain items. While Supermarket A may be cheaper for some items, Supermarket B are for others or Supermarket C has a good offer on that’s worth going for, so you split your shopping between those three stores or more to get the best overall deal and the most for your money.

Not only that but different stores have different quality items. Some aren’t worth touching and others are really good but expensive for what they are, so you also need to compromise if you’re to get the best deal and work out what is most worth your money.

The same goes for building links – not only ones that you need to pay for, ie. directory listings, guest blog posts and so on, but also for reciprocal links. Let me explain.

Site A is based loosely on your industry area, has an average home page PR and the PR of their interior pages is really weak, but one of them is closely related to your particular industry. Do you opt for relevance (more closely-related content to your industry) over quality (PR)?

Now let’s look at Site B, it’s a general directory covering all industries but has higher PR interior categories with a better PR overall, yet only really covers the umbrella terms for your particular industry.

Or maybe Site C is the better option? It’s relevant and has a higher PR but is expensive.

Now is the time to work out which option is best for what you want to achieve. Which is more worth your money? Don’t forget that you’re still on a tight budget.

Think about which approach is going to be most useful to your potential visitors, which is most likely to bring traffic to your website and which is most likely to help in the areas you want it to help. Factor in cost and quality as well as the value to both the visitors and your site.

Even when it comes to reciprocal link building, make sure that what you are giving away is closely matched to what you are offering. Just as you would with your shopping, you wouldn’t pay over the odds for a tin of beans when you know it will still only make part of one meal at the end of the day.

Have a think about how you can get the best return for what you spend on your online link building campaign, just as you would with your monthly shopping, as it can be the fine line between an average campaign on a small budget and a great campaign on a small budget.

Link building through blog commenting is only a small cog in the big wheel of SEO, but is a fantastic tool to help you build up your link profile, improve your search engine positions and get quality visitors that are genuinely interested in the services, products or information you offer. But it has to be done correctly if it’s going to work for you.

Being as I’ve already gone though finding better blogs to spend your time on and also selecting the best post to publish your comment on, I wanted to run through some key areas that will help improve the chances of your blog comment being approved by the site owner to help you get more from your blog commenting efforts.

I’ve listed several tips below that will help you do just that.

Read the post carefully
If the owner gets the impression that you’ve not read the post properly before you post your comment the chances are your post it won’t be approved. If it does, you’ll probably get a reply from another site user stating the obvious and it just doesn’t look good.

Add value
Maybe the post raises a question or you feel there is something they’ve missed out. Help fill in any gaps in a positive and helpful way and the owner will thank you by approving your comment if they feel it is valid. Maybe respond to a previous comment and engage in conversation.

Follow the pack
See what other people are doing in their approved comments. Have they managed to get away with having keywords as their name? If not, you probably won’t either.

Abide by the rules
Read over any guidelines the site may offer. The first thing that will get your comment rejected is not following the guidelines the owner has spent time writing and trying to get people to read. Guidelines on many blogs will be quite similar but it’s always worth checking if it means the difference between an approved link and a rejected one.

There are many methods you can employ to help get your comment (and link) past the author and made live, but the tips I’ve listed above make up some of the biggest changes you can make to your blog commenting technique that will help you see more comments being approved and more links to your website.

I’d also recommend checking out some of my previous blog posts in this small series on link building via blog commenting to help you find the best blogs to comment on and also find the best post within a particular blog to ensure you’re getting more valuable links from an industry relevant blog before you spend time writing that comment.

If you have any other tips feel free to share in a comment below.

This is part one of a three-part series of posts that covers some of the key things to look for and follow when posting comments on other people’s blogs when you’re building links to your own website.

First of all, when it comes to blog commenting, relevance is key. Commenting on a blog post or article relevant to your niche with a comment that illustrates your knowledge or expertise in the area and adds value to the original post is a great way to entice website visitors to click through to your own website – and greatly increases your chances of seeing your comment approved by the blog owner too.

But when it comes to blog commenting for SEO purposes, finding the best post to place your comment is where a lot of people come unstuck. Where do you start?

In addition to the above, there are a few other factors that should to be taken into consideration before you post that comment. Things such as the PR value of each page, the number of outbound links on the page, the number of comments already being displayed and whether the blog uses the nofollow attribute for comment links are all important factors that need to be taken into consideration before you hit that ‘Submit’ button.

As a guide, a page that has a healthy PR value with fewer outbound links and has a minimal number of comments already placed would be the ideal candidate, and providing they are in some way related to your own website or industry and don’t nofollow their links would be the perfect page to post your high-quality comment.

There are various tools out there that will give you this information at your fingertips and recommend a tool I use all the time as an SEO Consultant – SEOQuake. It will show you the PR of any given page and even highlight nofollow links so you can quickly tell whether a blog post is worth commenting on as part of your link building campaign.

The Mozbar will also give each page a ‘MozRank’, which is a good guide as to the quality of the pages based on the number and quality of inbound links, which could be used to help you in your decision. You can find more about this at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank where you can download the toolbar too.

Next week I’ll be covering a new method I’ve found while using SEO Quake to help you find the best post within a particular blog to submit your comment for maximum SEO benefit for you.