As a matter of fact, folks used to even run extraneous blog commenting campaigns, doing up to 100+ comments on a daily basis to quickly gather valuable back-links, drive more traffic and rank higher in the Google search results.

But, pretty soon the content king – Google realized the irony of the situation, and started penalizing websites that sold or gave away non nofollow links. As a result, even the default comments in all the newer versions of blogging engines like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes of them, had nofollow links by default.

Ever since then it has become a trend, and currently everybody has started using “nofollow” link tag – and even from social networking sites like FaceBook or Orkut, all that you can get is only nofollow links. But, social media is now becoming a great way to drive massive traffic and expose your business identity to the public.

Blog commenting has become a dying art and it is only a good way to build good rapport with fellow bloggers and improve the daily traffic to your website/blog. Something similar goes with the social networking and social media platforms, as one can only improve the traffic not Page Rank and search rankings with these links!

When it comes to link-building with so many constraints, a word of caution would be to remember the sheer fact that links to too many directories can make your site look like a link-farm – so beware Google is watching you!

Article directories are definitely the best bets to generate good backlinks. You may try running an article marketing campaign at reputed sites like EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com, Constant-Content.com, ArticlesBase.com and generate some targeted traffic as well as quality links.

Then the social bookmarking services like Digg Buzz.Yahoo, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, can come in handy in exposing your website to a wider range of audience and getting more traffic!

But, the bottom-line is that quality content, on-page organic SEO, and seamless user experience are the most effective ways to improve the overall SEO and search rankings of your website.

Last, but definitely not the least, you may want to add a robots.txt file on your root directory to exercise control over the pages that you DON’T want to be indexed by Google Crawler, Adsense Crawler and other bots. For instance, in a WordPress blog, you don’t want Google to crawl the /wp-admin folder, so you can add following line in robots.txt file –

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-admin

Note: Adding a sitemap to your site is a must!

Recently I was retained by a firm in Prague to help them select a local search engine or internet marketing professional and one of their first observations and questions to me was; How about we select one of the internet marketing firms listed in the ads.

Seriously people, select an SEO provider that places ads to get their business…. Are you kidding me? The most obvious observation is that the SEO firm or professional must suck. Rather harsh I know, but if your looking to hire someone to get your business to the top of Google or another search engine Do you really want to hire the guy that had to pay to get himself up there with an advertisement? No, you don’t cause obviously they can’t even compete in their own industry so what makes you think they can perform in others.

Anyways, we immediately discounted and excluded 8 SEO providers due to their inability to actually do any SEO on their own website and eventually found a professional organization who met the requirements. Requirements being a good reputation with their clients and the ability to SEO their own website.

I’m not totally opposed to ads, they can compliment the SEO efforts of a professional organization if done right. However if the SEO pro your looking at can’t get their own site ranked then I’d find someone who could.

Thats all for now on this topic. Something quick that was bugging me while I worked on my next post. The next post you ask? Well later this week I’ll focus on the numbers… I ran a poll with TechEast on the IT industry in Nova Scotia and I must say the numbers are terrible. Stay tuned for the post and hopefully some constructive feedback.

It will be nice when the new mobile companies get up and running here in Canada and hopefully make the mobile market somewhat competitive. Eventually North America as a whole will catch up to the current state of Europe, but by the time that happens we will be a decade behind them again.

On another note, I was also reading the “Google to count clicks” and wondering about the implications to businesses. At first glance this looks like it could be a helpful service, however at the same time the increased collection and use of data by Google could possibly cause higher advertising costs to businesses. I have to agree with some people and the concerns they are voicing. Tom Cuthbert said “ Watching Google Analytics, inviting advertisers to give them conversion data to “Optimize” (meaning increase) bid prices, sharing is risky”.

And last but not least… The power of Social Networks on business and more. Just reading “Visa, Facebook swing ad deal”. Slowly more companies are recognizing the value of social media and it will continue to grow as more recognized brands jump on board. This Visa deal on face book will offer “Visa is giving a $100 advertising credit on Facebook to each of the first 20,000 U.S. businesses that download the Web application needed to join the network, which debuts Tuesday. About 80,000 small businesses already have profiles on Facebook.”

I’ll have to follow this and see if this program expands outside of the US.

Anyways thats all for my random ramblings for today.