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One thing which is necessary for properly search engine optimising your site is building links which point to your site or blog. This may sound simple enough, but the work of building the kind of high quality links in sufficient numbers to increase your search engine ranking can be quite complex in practice.

One simple technique for building back links to your site is to post comments on “dofollow” blogs. This is easy, but is often not done correctly.

So what do I mean by “dofollow”?

To answer that question, you first have to know about “nofollow”. “Nofollow” an attribute of the anchor tag used to specify links in HTML. By placing the “nofollow” attribute on a link, a webmaster can BLOCK any “link juice” passing from their website to your website. In other words, the “nofollow” attribute makes a link useless from an SEO point of view.

As blogs began to grow in popularity, a lot of spammers developed programs to automatically generate comments which would contain their links (largely to porn sites, gambling sites, etc.).

That’s when major blogging platforms such as WordPress instituted the “nofollow” attribute as the default setting for blog comments. The idea was to eliminate the incentive to post comment spam.

Didn’t quite work out that way though - spam comments are still rife. It’s necessary to fit out every blog with a prophylactic anti-comment-spam plugin such as Akismet (my instance has nuked around half a million spam comments already).

The “nofollow” plugin on WordPress has not really performed as intended. Because of this, a “dofollow” plugin has been developed to disable nofollow attributes for external links and make comment links count in the eyes of search engines once again.

Seeing as it’s pretty much mandatory to moderate blog comments, my view is that it’s OK for comment links to pass some SEO value.

The important thing to note is that there are plenty of blogs out there which use the DoFollow plugin. All you need to do is.

1.Find these DoFollow blogs (one resource for this is DoFollowBlogs.com)

2.Add to the discussion by posting regular comments on DoFollow blogs

3.Watch your search engine rankings increase

This is just one of many possible link building strategies you could use; if your niche is a competitive one, posting comments on dofollow blogs won’t be enough on its own. That said, dofollow comments are a technique which can produce real results for the majority of blogs and sites offering a product or service.

The key here is to post regularly - just one comment won’t help you much. Post regularly and after some weeks or months you’ll start to see a difference.

Another vital strategy to keep in mind is that comments that offer value are likely to get approved by blogmasters. Many practitioners of the DoFollow strategy shoot themselves in the foot by posting self-promotional drivel that is simply deleted.

High-quality comments that contribute to the discussion will tend to garner more clickthroughs, in addition to potential search engine benefits.

One final point: you can outsource blog commenting to others, providing that the quality of posts is sufficient to ensure that comments get posted.

About the author: David B. Ascot is a specialist on sales lead generation and he shares his advice on improving your online lead generation.

Many people ponder whether it’s better to optimise a site to get free search engine rankings or to rely on PPC ads from Google Adwords.

The answer will always be the same. If you are able to profitably drive traffic to your website with each of the methods, both should be used for the greatest returns.

But you should also keep in mind that free search engines and paid search engines are very different animals.

This article will provide a detailed view of each so you can clearly understand the pros and cons of using SEO or search engine optimisation and PPC or pay-per click to drive traffic to your websites.

SEO vs PPC

Using pay-per-click is effective for a number of reasons:

1. It’s probably the quickest way to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. In most cases, you can see visitors within 10 minutes of posting and add. It will take much longer to see results if you opt to use SEO techniques.

2. If you use SEO you don’t have much control over where your visitors are directly, but with pay per click advertising you total control over where your site visitors land.

3. You can easily test multiple headlines / copy / offers by testing ads in Google Adwords.

4 You can drive traffic for a variety of different keywords, but with SEO you’re better off targeting just a few keywords.

5. You won’t have to build your website to be “search engine friendly” when you us PPC. For example, a website that’s build in flash won’t attract search engine spiders, but won’t affect PPC traffic.

6. Rather than worrying about each search engines ranking formula, you’ll be optimising for conversion results.

7. You can easily change positions on the page in order to find the best Return On Investment.

8. The changes to the rules of PPC search engines are usually less often and less significant to the changes that take place with the SEO rules.

SEO (free traffic) is good because-

1. It costs nothing-its absolutely free.

2. You will be able to generate tons of traffic for terms that would be very costly with PPC.

3. The long term returns on your investments are usually better than they would be with PPC. It does take longer to see results, but it’s a lot cheaper in the long term.

4. Once you have earned good rankings, it’s pretty easy to keep them with very little additional effort.

5. You can build great momentum that will make it possible for you dominate the market and leave your competitors to bleed themselves dry trying to compete using PPC search engine marketing as they have to pay for every click.

To conclude, PPC and SEO both have a place in an online lead generation strategy for your website.

It seems that the field of Search Engine Optimisation can leave you frustrated, waste your time, and blow your budget all at the same time because of all the half truths and misinformation.

About the author: Mr David B. Ascot is sharing his sales lead generation hints to ensure your business profits through online lead generation.

I was talking the other day to a colleague about website building. He told me that in the mid-90s, a government agency allotted a budget of $400,000 for websites, not knowing what it would cost.

A few years later, a company decided that they needed to establish an online presence. They found a web designer, who told them that for a mere $40,000, their site could be built.

Fast forward to 2003 - the Internet had started to mature and become a viable revenue-generator for most ‘offline’ product and service businesses. A wide range of web design companies and specialist firms had sprung up in addition to clearing houses such as Elance and Guru.com.

Companies were paying for people who understood this new technology. It’s much like the early days of automotive technology, when anyone who could afford a car would also have their own mechanic to take care of the then impenetrable technologies behind their car.

Now, we’re seeing this trend of ‘democratising the web’ continue, and the geeks in the middle are getting squeezed out and commoditised. The technologies for building and managing websites are becoming more and more accessible and user-friendly.

The top 20% of highly technically skilled web designers are beginning to make a transition towards marketing and analytical skill rather than emphasising solely technical expertise.

Emerging technologies that are democratising the web

Site Design:

There are now a lot of choices for software which anyone can use to build a relatively good looking website in an hour or less. There are also a lot of user-friendly content management systems which let users design a website without ever seeing any code. While these programs usually don’t have a lot of advanced features, they work fine for any simpler sort of website.

The Analytics of the Site:

Only a few years ago, you needed a specialist in order to pull any useful statistics from your site other than page views. However, there are now a wide variety of cheap or free tools which can give you all of the data you could possibly want.

Optimising the Site:

Multivariate analysis of landing page content is another area that has come a long way. Testing different landing page versions is one of the core techniques of website conversion optimisation. Traditionally it has involved setting up software to serve and track different content.

As someone who provides these kinds of services, I think that a lot of companies feel like what they are paying for is the technical aspects (method) more so than for the marketing aspect (results).

There are new services, some of which are free which provide this kind of testing. They don’t offer a lot of advanced features, but work fine for the majority of uses.

Anyone who offers conversion optimisation is going to need to be sure that the added value of their marketing techniques is sufficient to attract clients as the technical aspects become demystified.

At the lower end especially, technical smarts are getting squeezed out and commoditized in favour of the marketing and analytical skills required to make sense of data and turn it into improved outcomes (i.e. Return On Investment).

While there will always be a place for those who are highly skilled in web technologies, I expect to see a growing number of simpler technical duties being offshored.

Where there will be growth is in the area of teaching and implementing marketing techniques which will help companies to make their web presence more profitable. Understanding and optimising online marketing can be more valuable to companies than capital investments in new technologies.

About the author: Mr David B. Ascot shares sales lead generation strategies that work so your business can boom through online lead generation.