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.

WordPress is the largest open source blogging platform in the world, this week we are going to give you 5 top tips for optimising your wordpress installation.

We are Creare use wordpress for a range of applications for our clients and it has always been important that the search engines crawl the articles and pages correctly.

So firstly…

1. All in one SEO pack

This is a commonly downloaded plugin that offers complete flexibility on variables such as Page titles and Meta data, You can see in the example you can overwrite the default WordPress settings on the ‘edit’ page.

All in one SEO pack

2. Adjusting your permalink structure

In your wordpress settings you can adjust the ‘permalinks’ this allows you to adjust the default query string of a blog post into a search engine friendly URI (Uniform Resource Indicator).

You will need to make your .htaccess file writable in order to change this setting, but once done your blog posts URL’s will include your keywords which will help your long tail performance in SERPS.

3. Inlink Plugin

The inlink plug in integrates into every blog posts and allows you to specific a particular keyword and corresponding landing page for your blog. You simple identify the keyword, URL, Times you wish to create a link per post and whether you want the link follow or no follow.

WordPress inlink plugin

4. Google XML sitemaps

This automatically generates a XML sitemap that is Yahoo, Google and Bing compliant. You can then submit your XML sitemap to webmaster tools.

Google XML Generator

5. Excerpt rather than full blog post on /blog/ page.

To avoid any duplicate content issues, we would recommend that you source just the article excerpt on your /blog/ homepage. This will help the article or blog post get the full authority for the content.

Thanks for watching.

For those of you starting out, and want a couple of SEO tips to get you started, I will outline the basics you need to get to grips with, or if you are paying someone to carry out your SEO, it might be important for you to understand the resource that goes into your internet marketing.

I may stand alone in saying this (I’m hoping not) but more times than I care to mention, I have “discovered” a new interest, a temporary flash of inspiration and gone and brought every book I can on the subject. I will possibly read one, I will flick through a couple, get bored and throw myself in at the deep end and learn by my mistakes, filling in the gaps as I go along. When embarking in the world of SEO I may as well have been sitting in a room with people speaking French, I was lucky in that I have a few pretty good very patient translators around me. So here are my tips for SEO Newbies, they are not black and white, I’m not going to hand it to you on a plate more leave the sauce pan on the hob, and let you help yourself:

1.Don’t fall at the first hurdle, pick a web designer who can build your site to be search engine friendly and understands organic SEO, java script and flash will make your site pretty but spiders crawl text.

2.In an ideal world pick your keywords and search phrases before work on the site starts, use these appropriately in the copy, text links, domain and respectfully in ALT tags (make sure they still serve their purpose).

3.Don’t put all your eggs in one basket with one hugely competitive keyword, focus on some smaller long tail keywords at the same time and watch the traffic and conversions increase.

4.Make sure you have keyword rich title tags and descriptions on each page of your site, if you have space (there is a limit to the number of characters you can have) include your company name at the end.

5.If you are optimising regionally, you need to make sure you include the areas you cover within your copy.

6.Content, if you have done any back ground reading you will know unique, well-written keyword rich content is imperative (but not go over board, if it looks unnatural you will be penalized). Make sure you check it in copyscape to ensure you have no duplicate content.

7.Updating your site frequently with fresh useful content can improve your rankings, I would strongly advise adding a newsfeed such as wordpress to make this quick and easy. Adding new pages takes much more time and effort, if you can aim to blog 3 times a week.

8.Links I see as a reference to back up your theory (your site is relevant for the keywords you want to appear for), others describe them as votes, imagine them as you wish, but learn about them and use them correctly, the more you know the less work you will have to do. It is true that if you compress sand hard enough you will eventually get stone, but save your self the time and effort by using less but better quality links to support you keywords.

9.Make sure you link your keywords throughout your site to the page you are optimising them on, describe the link with related words using anchor text.

10.Last but not least, don’t be afraid to link to other related sites. It wont do you any harm.

I think those ten points are a good start for this week. If you want to succeed in your search engine optimisation there are 4 main aspects at this stage you need to plan for, and they all work hand in hand I will explain how. Your aims are reputation (Google views your site as authoritative and informative) Your objectives are popularity (getting visitors to your site). Your method is content and links. Makes it sound easy eh?

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a look at setting up and utilising Google segments and advanced segments for additional reports of keyword performance or to isolate particular information from your website.

Google segments allows further analysis of the information within Google analytics and allows you to quickly check your sites perform against certain conditions and values.

This can be great for reporting information back to your clients about the work you have done increasing traffic generated from organic search or referrals from websites you have links or banners on.

The tutorial this week, will illustrate how to use the default analytic segments and the set up of advanced segments.

Thanks for watching this, please leave any questions or comments on the supporting blog post.

Over the last year Nick, James and a few irregular guests have been providing a SEO video blog each week, they have now reached half a century of video blogs, so we though we would link to them all as it may be a helpful resource to some of you optimisers out there.

1. What are meta tags?
2. Keyword selection
3. The basics of on site SEO
4. Sitemaps HTML / XML
5. MOD re-write for Apache PHP servers
6. Feedburner setup
7. RSS Aggregation – Simple pie setup
8. Microsoft and Yahoo Merge
9. Duplicate content / copyscape
10. Canonicalisation
11. How to write a press release
12. How to write a press release – part 2
13. How to write a press release – part 3
14. Google caffeine update
15. SEO vs usability
16. SEO vs Accessability
17. SEO Friendly Flash Embedding
18. Twitter for Search Engine Optimisation
19. 301 redirects
20. Rel = nofollow
21. Google analytic goals
22. Google Insights
23. Long tail SEO
24. Google analytic Intelligence
25. Webmaster tools
26. SEO spyglass and Link analysis
27. Heading optimisation
28. Internal Linking
29. Personalised search
30. Real time search
31. SEO Christmas song
32. Searched based keyword tool
33. Paid Links
34. Firefox plugins for SEO
35. ROI organic vs PPC
36. Organic SEO timescales
37. How does SEO work?
38. Google customisation
39. Geotargeting
40. Google Labs
41. Auto captions in Youtube
42. Webmaster tools labs
43. SEO friendly architecture
44. Canonical Link Element
45. SEO encyclopedia
46. Protecting trademarks in Google Adwords
47. Movement in organic search
48. SEO content
49. Click through rate
50. Universal search eye tracking

We hope that you can put some use to the videos above, please feel free to leave any comments below.