Of course, I’ve left the hardest for last. This one is going to take planning and forethought on your part because it’s key to achieving your goal — listing on page one of Google (or any search engine‘s) search results page for your chosen keywords.

Ok, I know you’re chomping at the bit to know just what this last mountain you have to climb is. You’re ready to reach Mohamed, so let’s get on with it.

Back links.

I’ve recently read a couple of articles on back link strategies that involve commenting on “do follow” blogs (which this is one in case you don’t already know it).  One is “Link Building With Comments on Dofollow Blogs” written by Layne at Reward Rebel in which she makes a couple of salient points that many of you don’t keep in the forefront of your minds when commenting. The one that’s most important in my mind is to leave them on blogs that are in your niche.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have back links from sites that are RELEVANT to your subject and keywords. In other words, your “competition”! I’m almost scared to admit it, but leaving your comments here doesn’t do much for you in the way of relevance because this blog is so all over the place with keywords that I have no niche — be that as it may, I hope my admission hasn’t shot me in the foot and run all of you off. It would be awfully lonely in here without you!

Atniz has written a post on “How to Value Dofollow Back Links” that further illustrates this point. She’s taken quite a hard-line approach to finding relevant sites and working methodically to improve her positioning in the search results. And she’s getting there! She’s got a PR of 2 for her main page. Her posts aren’t ranked, though and I think that has to do with her permalink structure which is a point I should have covered before and didn’t (so sue me).

There is a tool you can use called Backlink Checker that will check the back links to your site and tell you what the page rank and Alexa rank of the sites that have them is. There are several other tools on that web page that you might find useful as well — a keyword suggestion tool, a text link value tool and a PR Checker. Here you can see my first 19 results. You can see that I don’t do such a great job of getting back links :/

Besides this list, it also produces this graph so you can tell at a glance how many of what ranking back links you have. If you’re into statistics about your blog, you’ll find this to be quite interesting.

Having quality inbound links to your site (back links) are one of the cornerstones of the site ranking algorithm that Google uses.

Another tool you may find useful is Google’s tool that finds all the sites that link to a page that doesn’t exist on your site. Why should you care about that? Well, because people who *MIGHT* just click that link are taken to a 404 page and you don’t get that visitor, PLUS the LINK DOESN’T COUNT. Asking the site owners to fix the link just might mean the difference between PR2 and PR3 at the next update.

So, here’s your homework. Read the articles I’ve given you — c’mon now, they’re both short so quit complaining! Now find the highest PR dofollow blog you can and leave a GREAT comment on it (no spammy one-liners allowed) — think about saying something with a couple of your keywords or a long-tail keyword included.

Do this every day for the next five days and let’s meet back here and compare notes…what do you say? Are you game? I’m double-dog darin’ ya.

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