On Tuesday 03 August Alex Crabtree joined Joan and Kate on Giant Squid Open Mike to discuss how to get quality backlinks.
Kate asked if you had to join a lot of directories to get backlinks and Alex said no, the most important thing is to make sure you have good content. That way other bloggers and website owners will refer to your site with a good link.
Alex explained that backlinks are a great aid to navigation. They help people to find more information about their search topic and they also help the Google spiders determine quality sites, which will help with Page Rank.
Dofollow blogs are a great source of backlinks – most blogs require commentors to add a webpage link in order to comment. Leave a comment that is relevant and it gets indexed by the robots, which will follow the link.
Joan asked how often you should do this and Alex said it depends how much time you have but not to worry about doing more than 3 or 4 a day. They agreed that you have to select which lenses you are going to promote and just do it for one or two lenses a week as for those of us who have a lot of lenses, it will be impossible to promote very many each week.
Kate, Joan and Alex also discussed how easy it is to lose your focus if you get too embroiled in Web 2.0 networking. You can get trapped into feeling you have to keep up with so many networks that you spend all your time networking and not enough time publishing.
You need to find blogs that are relevant to your niche and keep visiting them, so you can build up a credible reputation.Blogs that allow CommentLuv are especially useful as it can help with traffic back to your blog.
Alex reminded us that each blog post has a permalink and it is these that you should post in your comments on other relevant blogs, NOT your blog home page.This will also help with indexing and establishing your reputation as a quality blog with Google.
There’s lots more tips from Alex in this excellent broadcast – I really recommend that you get yourself a cup of coffee (or tea 
) and allow yourself 30 minutes to listen. You may like to have a notebook handy!
Although, this was the “first Tuesday” broadcast which I generally do with Alex, I was away for a few days and my slot on Giant Squid Open Mike will be next Tuesday August 10, when I will be talking about what it is like for someone who is English and living in England and who spends a lot of time publishing and networking on what is primarily an American site.
) “Let the games begin!”
Correen (clouda9)
AJ