Use Google Alerts to Help Build Links

I talked a little while ago about how link building is dead”. In that post Danny Sullivan exposes the way some people go about creating links to their website. That is exactly the kind of stupidity I was talking about.

One of the best ways I have found to create quality links back to a site is to participate in the conversations on people’s blogs the hardest part is finding blogs to take part in. This is where Google Alerts comes in handy. You can create an alert for a topic you are interested in and Google Alerts will send you an email when it discovers a blog that has created a post on that topic. All you need to do then is visit the blog post and leave a comment.

It is important to not leave spammy comments otherwise your comment will probably not be approved and your work will be for not. Take the time to actually read the post, and contribute to the conversation that is taking place on the blog. There have been several blogs that I have found using Google Alerts that I now regularly participate on and I also get regular visitors from as well.

Some of you might be saying to yourself “but Lee most blogs use nofollow on comments so I don’t get any Google juice by doing this.” If your sole purpose on building links to your website is to get some magical Google PageRank juice then don’t even bother. Creating quality links that will bring real people to come and visit your website or blog is of much higher value than some magical Google PageRank juice. Remember you should be building your website or blog for your users not for search engines, so work on getting links and visitors.

This is just one of the tools I use regularly to keep in touch with what others are saying on topics I am interested in on the web. What are some tools you use to help your commenting and building links back to your website or blog?