Website owners from all niches are looking for high quality backlinks to increase their site popularity.  This speaks to the off-site search engine optimization component to ranking high in Google.  Unlike making minor keyword tweaks to one’s website, building up targeted organic traffic can often require patience and time.  This post will look at commenting on .edu blogs as a means of increasing relevant backlinks.

So why is blog commenting thought to be an important technique for internet marketers?  The primary reason is to increase your own site’s SEO but building up one-way backlinks to your site.  In Google’s eyes the blog comment backlink serves as a popularity vote in a sense.  The more reputable the source the more weight the backlink holds.  The way we do this is searching for do-follow .edu blogs with high pageranks.

Let’s look at why each of these is important.  The term do-follow refers to the linking capability.  After many marketers started abusing blogs’ social nature solely for backlinks, blog owners in turn added the “no-follow” tag to their blog comments.  While the link may be active and clickable, Google announced that it wouldn’t recognize it as a backlink.  Fortunately there are tools available to search out the do-follow blogs.

Secondly, you want to stick to moderate to high pagerank sites whenever possible.  These are more favorable since they pass on some of that pagerank (or “juice”) along to the outgoing links on the page.  You can easily assess the blog’s Google pagerank by installing the SearchStatus Add-on for Firefox.

The last element of high reputation rests in the type of blog it is: .edu, .gov, .com, or .org.  Search engines assign higher preference to .edu and .gov sites such as large universities and governmental agencies.  Two of my favorite .edu blogs are the business and marketing departments of Harvard and Stanford.

Thus far I’ve covered the technical end of things.  Other reasons include attracting .edu blog subscribers by having them click on your icon or linked text, and subsequently networking with these subscribers.  The final aspect of effective blog commenting is perhaps the more obvious one.  Be real, genuine and personal to set yourself apart from all the comment spammers out there.  Build your trust with blog authors and moderators by contributing your honest and relevant opinion.  This greatly improves the likelihood for having your comment approved and makes blog commenting that much more enjoyable.

For more information on ranking high in Google, watch this video on Using the Alexa toolbar for firefox