In order to gain site traffic, you must build links. Its inevitable. There are no magic formulas or little red easy buttons to make this happen. Most sites build their links manually until the site picks up steam and are able to gain links from great exposure and content. There are two great plugins for WordPress that will help you in your quest for site exposure and search rankings.
KeywordLuv is a WordPress plugin that gives a dofollow links to the commenter with their preferred anchor text without the commenter being perceived as a spammer. Its a great way for blog owners to get regular readers and commenters. According to the keywordLuv site:
“When your readers leave a comment, they should leave their name and keywords in the Name field, using the following format:
name @ keyword
When posts are displayed, the plugin searches for the @ character, strips it out and moves the name to front (outside the link).”
CommentLuv is a WordPress plugin that parses the RSS feed of the website that the commenter entered. It displays a link to the most recent post and typically makes the link dofollow. Although, you will find some sites do still utilize the nofollow attribute with commentLuv.
So you may be asking yourself: “that’s great if I find a site that uses those plugins and encourages commenting”. Well, its much easier to find those sites than you may think.
As an SEO Consultant I spend a great deal of time reading articles related to my industry and marketing in general. Because I spend so much time educating myself, I find that it was easy for me to link build at the same time. Although, I do read articles at sites that do use nofollow, I typically only reward sites with my readership when they reward comment links with linkjuice. I am very careful not to spam these sites, I read a post and when I have a value added comment, I simply leave it and voila! A link.
I do work up front to make sure I am viewing sites that will benefit me with great information and links. Chances are, if an SEO related site is not willing to share a dofollow link, they are more than likely not going to share the best information they have either. Granted, we all have techniques we are not going to broadcast, but my goal for this site is for someone to be able take and use this information to help their site be more successful. Authors that take this same approach are the ones I enjoy reading.
Alright, so lets use Google to find some of these value added sites. We are going to start with a random search. First I tried purposes, but I misspelled that and ended up searching for dolphins. Am I an avid dolphin fan? Well, no. However, I grew up around the ocean and had some cool experiences with dolphins. So lets assume that I wrote a post about dolphins.
For keywordLuv, the default text that is added to the site below the comments is:
“This site uses KeywordLuc. Enter YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field to take advantage.”
So I did a search like this in Google:
“This site uses KeywordLuv” dolphins
The text in quotes will show text that matches it verbatim. The second part is where you want to include the word or phrase that closely relates to your site or recent post. The first page that was returned in the search was “The Elusive Dolphin Photo”.
And on that page, we lucked out…we have keywordLuv, commentLuv, and the blog is a part of the dofollow movement.
So after looking at the photo, I would simply read the post and leave a comment. In the name section I would leave the following:
Jason@Dolphin Photos
My website about dolphins would now have a link with the anchor text “Dolphin Photos”. After I submitted the comment, commentLuv would parse my last post and place a link to it at the bottom of the page like:
My Cool Dolphin Experience -pretend that was a link…
Speaking of commentLuv, it is a great way to get deep links into your site. So in order to find a site that uses commentLuv, search for the following:
“Enable CommentLuv” dolphins
You will find sites related to dolphins that use commentLuv. Read the posts and leave a great comment. Now you have two great links, one to your home page and one deep into your site using the title of the page, which is almost perfect SEO.
One thing I must point out, abusing these techniques will only make site owners discontinue use of commentLuv and keywordLuv. So don’t do it. Also, Always Check The Comment Links For Dofollow Links Before Reading. There is nothing worse than reading a super long post (like this one) and than leaving a super long comment, only to find out that the link doesn’t even count!
