So feel free to leave comments.

If you have a business, you need to be seen on the web.  This means you need to be listed in as many free online directories as possible, you need to score highly on the Google 7-pack (or 3-pack, or 10-pack), and you need to have a website that ranks highly with a regular Google search. 

There are many ways to optimize your website copy and structure to be placed higher on Google and to become recognized faster.  Having a blog is an easy way to create more valuable free content to readers while being indexed more often and with more pages with Google. (If you can create a 140 character tweet, you can probably muster out a 280 character blog post and get your message across while creating content for your own website.)  One of the most powerful things to do, after you’ve set up your site and blog is to become more interactive, and to leave your mark all over the internet that points back to your website.  These are called backlinks. 

Backlinks point to your website. The more backlinks that you have, especially if they are relevant to your topic, the higher your website will rank with a “Page Rank”  Page Rank is named after Larry Page of Google, and thus is a proper noun.  The unique algorithms that determine how the Page Rank works is kept secret by Stanford University and is licensed by Google. If you comment on blogs and you leave behind your website address, it should get picked up by Google and it should be indexed.

There’s a problem, though.

Most blogs that you read secretly tag your comments and the links that you provide with a no-follow tag.  This is set up by default in WordPress, and there’s actually no button to press to turn it off. This means that if you are reading someone’s blog, and you would like to make a comment on it, your weblink to your own website will not be indexed by Google.  While this isn’t the only reason to comment on someone’s blog, it is a big incentive to do so.

Let’s change that:

If you have a WordPress Blog, You can go into the plugins part of the menu, and “Add New.”  then do a search for “dofollow”, install it, and activate it.  Mine was do-follow 4.0. If you don’t use WordPress, you might have to see if you can change your setting to allow follows, or see if there is a plug-in that you can download to allow others to be followed.

Why do you want others to be able to use your website to create back links?  You don’t want to be taken advantage of, and you don’t want more spam. The truth is, though, is that WordPress is very good at filtering out spam.  With some rare exceptions, the only comments I get on this blog is legitimate comments. 

I want to reward people who come to my blog to add to the content.  I want to encourage a sense of community. When Google sees that you have a lot of people making comments on your blog, they see that as a sign of popularity, which makes you more relevant. When your readers see that they are getting backlinks from your site, it encourages them to come back.  See how that works?  It’s shared benefit between you and your readers. 

This is not to say that you should be leaving empty comments on blogs just to get your site listed in there.  We still want to encourage thoughtful participation.  But it is time to reward your readers.

So, again, this is a do-follow blog.  When you leave a comment below, and you list your website, it will be indexed by Google.  Other websites out there won’t.  On my blogroll on the right, you can see my friends Kevin Smith and Scott Swanson.  They also have do-follow websites.  You should visit them too; they’ve got good content.

And, go ahead and leave a comment below.  If you are an expert in SEO, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this (I could be wrong!)  If you are a chiropractor or other kind of doctor or health care professional, leave me a hello and your credentials.  I’d like to network with you, even if you live across the country.

Todd Lloyd, DC
a Sonoma Chiropractor