Marketing Ninja

In my previous entries on Blogging for Business I discussed how blogging can help improve your business and blogging for your customers versus blogging for your business.

Today we’re going to discuss how trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on other blogs can improve your search rankings on popular engines like Google, Yahoo, and Live.com; increase your readership; and establish your company as an authority in your domain.

Everyone knows that a high ranking on search engines for search keywords relevant to your product will help drive sales to your business; an entire industry has grown around the concept of search engine optimization, techniques used to help websites increase their exposure on popular search engines.

We will not be discussing many SEO techniques beyond the basic principle of “the more external and internal links to your site, the better,” so if you want to get yourself up to speed on the latest and greatest search engine optimization techniques then I highly recommend reading SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

The Basic Principle of Search Engine Optimization

To quote Google on how their PageRank relevancy ranking algorithm works:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

So to summarize in absolute layman’s terms

the more links pointing to your site from external, relevant websites, the greater your rankings will be in search engine results. Internal links within your website also help improve your search engine rankings.

This is as far as we are going to get into search engine optimization.

Now we are going to cover how blogging can help us increase our number of external links through trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on other blogs!

Step 1: Find authoritative blogs in your company’s domain

It’s research time. Here are a few good places to get started searching for blogs within your domain:

• Technorati – The blogging search engine. Technorati is unique in the way it ranks blogs, by authority, meaning that the blog that has the most posts written about it by other blogs appears highest in the search results.
• Technorati’s Most Popular Blogs – These include the most popular blogs in the world in all categories. What you’ll want to do though is find a blog that fits your GENERAL domain; for instance if you are involved in the technology industry, you should go to one of the appropriate “top blogs” from this list, like engadget, and then use that blog’s internal search function on keywords relevant to your niche in the business. Top blogs utilize a lot of smaller, niche blogs when they want to write on specific subjects. Find those niche blogs.
• Bloglines – Another popular blog search engine.
• Google Blog Search – Google’s at it again

Step 2: Look, listen, learn

One of the lessons my 10th grade English teacher taught me is particularly relevant:

The best way to learn how to write is not to practice writing, but rather it is reading the works of great writers.

Let’s go ahead and adjust this pearl of wisdom for the world of blogging:

The best way to learn how to blog is not to practice blogging, but rather is is reading the works of great bloggers.

While you may have professional copywriters or publicists in your employ, you are going to want to read the blogs not to see how the blog authors write copy, but you’re going to want to see:

• what the bloggers are discussing
• what the hot topics and controversies are
• how the bloggers generate discussion
• what the commenters on those blogs are saying

If you write material that is relevant to the popular discussions, you’re going to have a much better chance at drawing attention to your corporate blog from the beginning. Understanding the blogging trends in your domain is key to getting effective links and passionate readers.

Step 3: Deploy your blog

Now that you have a sense for what’s popular in the blogging communities for your company’s domain, go ahead and get your blog deployed, and start writing content for your blog relevant to the buzz in those communities.

I will be adding entries down the road on what sort of content to write, but just remember that you’re blogging for your customers and not for your business.

Step 4: Include trackbacks and pingbacks in your posts

I posted a video tutorial on what trackbacks and pingbacks are as part of the Blogging for Business series.

In addition on my BlogEngine.NET test blog I stepped into the difference between how the Wordpress and BlogEngine.NET blogging platforms handle trackbacks and pingbacks, but for the sake of thoroughness I’ll reiterate what trackbacks and pingbacks are:

Notification Services: Technorati, Newsgator, and a number of other services out there are used as “notification” services by blogs; whenever a new post is made the blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, BlogEngine.NET) checks the content of the new blog entry for any links to other blog entries. The blog engine itemizes these links and alerts the notification services, which then contacts the sites hosting the links’ destination. If the destination site subscribes to the same notification service that your site subscribes to, it may choose to register your inbound link as a pingback or trackback.

Pingback: A pingback is an organic link that occurs within one blog entry. It extends from one blog entry to either another blog entry or some external site that uses a pinging notification service. When a pingback occurs on a blog a new comment gets added with the following information:

• The title of the blog entry that pinged the article
• A link to the blog entry that pinged the article
• Some context in which the “pingback” link occurred
• Time at which the blog was notified about the pingback

Here is an example of a pingback appearing as a comment on my blog

Trackback: A trackback is a bit of a different animal from a pingback. Pingbacks are organic; they occur naturally in the process of referencing relevant sources. Trackbacks are explicit pingbacks; they were added to blogging back in the day when sophisticated blog engines that could detect pings within articles didn’t exist.

In order to publish a trackback to a blog, you have add explicit trackback URLs to your post before you publish it. Here’s an example of a trackback to my own blog (click for a full sized image):

Trackbacks also appear as comments on the blog that you tracked back to; sometimes they are even given prominence over the comments and listed above as separate entities. The world’s most popular web 2.0 start up blog, TechCrunch, does this for instance:

Trackbacks and pingbacks are the most conceptually challenging part about writing blogs, but for those of you who need it in absolute layman’s terms:

1. reference authoritative and relevant blog entries in your corporate blog entries frequently. Obviously, do it naturally, but through referencing these blogs you will accumulate backlinks to your site.

Benefits of Pingbacks and Trackbacks:

1. Backlinks increase the number of external links to your site, which increases your search engine rankings
2. Readers of other blogs may follow pingback/trackback notifications back to your site
3. By having your blog’s entries appear on the trackbacks section of a more authoritative blog, you reap some of the benefits of branding by domain association

If you are not convinced that trackbacks and pingbacks are helpful in improving your readership then please read DmNews’ column on using blogs to improve search engine rankings.

Step 5: Provide thoughtful, insightful, and genuinely helpful comments on authoritative blogs

Establishing yourself as an “expert reader” on an authoritative blog is a great gateway to building up your reputation within the blogging community for your company’s domain. Here are the immediate benefits to commenting on other authoritative blogs:

• It establishes YOUR NAME as an authority on the subjects being discussed on popular blogs; you are effectively creating a brand name for yourself.
• It gives you instant exposure to a large audience.
• It provides links back to your blog. Most comment systems allow for you to specify a website address; usually your user name is used as the text for the link.

The third bullet is where the SEO benefits rear their head. Posting comments on other people’s blogs helps build external links back to your site, which will ultimately help your search engine rankings. Even if it doesn’t help your search engine rankings it will still drive traffic to your site if your comments are thoughtful and helpful.

So remember,

the key to being a good commenter is to provide genuinely helpful advice and feedback.

Pointy-Haired Pitfalls:

In honor of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, I am going to add a new section of each of these Blogging for Business entries with some pointy-haired pitfalls, which is just another way of saying areas where corporations often get it wrong.

Here are the pointy-haired pitfalls for using trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments on external blogs:

• Pinging/Tracking back to irrelevant blogs – This will hurt both your authority and your search engine rankings at the same time.
• Spamming ping/track backs – Link posts are fine every now and then, but if you are really reaching to link every possible blog entry you can find, you are going to ultimately damage your authority and reputation as a blogger.
• Spamming comments – Ruins your credibility and authority.

Further Reading:

• How Not to Improve SEO With Blogs: 5 Golden Rules
• ProBlogger.net: No-one links to the linkers (for those of you considering doing link posts)
• ProBlogger.net: Grow your blog’s readership by targeting readers

 

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