I came across this while doing some research for a book I’m writing for a SEO class I am to teach next week and the week after. It’s excellent!

66 Ways to Build Links

Step 4: Post Properly Formatted and Relevant Comments

A blog lives on its overall popularity. A popular blog tends to have multiple people contributing to the online “conversation,” therefore the blog owner wants people to participate because that means the blog is effective. A blog with few comments either means the content isn’t interesting or not that many people are reading it. Knowing this, it’s easy to leverage this dynamic to gain an advantage by simply participating. We need something in return for that participation, however—a link back to the site we’re looking to promote or optimize.

A “raw” link, http://yourdomain.com for example, doesn’t do us as much good as a link with our keyword phrase as the anchor text. Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link’s destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the main English Wikipedia page might take this form:

Wikipedia

The anchor text in this example is Wikipedia; the complex URL http://www.wikipedia.org displays on the web page as Wikipedia, contributing to a clean, easy to read text or document.

Popular misuse

Webmasters tend to misuse anchor text quite often this way:

Today our president has signed another treaty. To know more, click here.

The correct way of coding that would be:

Today our president has signed another treaty.

Search engine algorithms

Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

Webmasters may use anchor text to procure high results in search engine results pages. Google‘s Webmaster Tools facilitate this optimization by letting website owners view the most common words in anchor text linking to their site.^[1]

In the past, Google bombing has been possible through anchor text manipulation; however, in January, 2007, Google announced it had updated its algorithm to minimize the impact of Google bombs.^[2]

When considering commenting on a blog, browse over others’ comments before doing so. See whether their names have been linked back to their websites or not. If they have not, work your link into the comment somehow following the formatting guidelines in our example above. Be sure you comment something relevant to the original blog posting and if you do have to work the link in with the comment section, make it part of a sentence if at all possible. This will reduce the risk of getting the comment rejected by the blog moderator. Some blogs don’t allow links within the comments so beware of them, and simply move onto the next blog if you can’t get a link back for commenting. There are too many blogs out there to get hung up on trying to get one link out of one specific blog.