It is the beginning of the month… what does that mean? Besides bills? That the “Top Commenter” plugin on a majority of blogs who use this plugin gets reset. That means you can get free site-wide links and advertising… for free… did I mention free? Yes, it’s free, free, free! Welcome to the Department of the Redundancy Department.

What EXACTLY does this mean for you? Instead of digging through the archives to try and find which posts have a high page rank and leave a comment on those pages, you can leave a comment on any page and still get the PR from the pages that have higher page rank, because you get the PR from EVERY page on the site.

All you need to do is to post a comment to every post they make. Be sure to contribute to the posts and not just spam, because that will make a webmaster either de-link you (which is possible) or make their whole blog “nofollow” which will hurt your efforts too.

Instead, just respond by either asking a question… expanding on the post,… answering another commenter’s question… etc. Then, visit these blogs that use “Top Commenter” whenever they make a new post, and comment on it, and you will stay ahead of everybody on the Top Commenter post. If you have to, dig through the archives and comment on a post, in order to keep yourself on the list. Plus, while making all of those posts (if the blog uses “dofollow”) you are building backlinks that way, even if you aren’t the top commenter.

AND, if you use the CommentLuv love trick I posted about earlier this week, then that’s double your backlinks, plus if you get top commenter, the nice site-wide link (on every single page) will be good for search engine listings, number of backlinks, and for free advertising.

Just, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not spam.

Enjoy the tip… it is still early in the month to snag a few top commenter spots! Start out with my blog for the free no follow backlinks from the top commenter plugin.

P.S. Don’t have like 65 comments, when the second place person has 6. Do enough to stay in the top 5, or top 8, or whatever, but don’t do a ridiculous amount of comments that shows you are just trying to get that spot. Also, the more posts that you comment on now, the less in the archive that will be available for each and every month in the future.

UPDATE: Easily find DoFollow Blogs with TopCommenters (Top Commentators) plugin installed, with our DoFollow Blogs Search Engine, DoFollow Diver!

One of the first posts I made on this blog dealt with different websites that you can use to check your backlinks (See: How To Check How Many Backlinks Your Site Has). I figured it would be kind of popular, but I had no clue that it would be as popular as it is! People really want to be able to check how many backlinks they have. They also like to check the backlinks of their competitors’ websites.

So, in an effort to bring my readers what they want, I have scoured the web for even more websites that you can use to check how many backlinks your site has. Not all of them are the best, and some really aren’t that great at all, but hopefully with a whole bunch options for checking your backlinks, you are able to find one or two that you really like.

NOTE: As I wrote in the previous “Check Your Backlinks” post, I suggest not using them all. I also recommend that you don’t compare the numbers against each other. Find the one that works best for you and seems most accurate for your site, and monitor it weekly in order to see the progress of your one way link building campaign.

Now, here’s the list:

Link Diagnosis
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com
This is a nice tool for showing you your backlinks, and also breaking down your backlinks of your internal pages too. To get the full effect of this tool, you need to install the Firefox plugin for it (don’t worry, they’ll tell you that you need to, and how to install it.) It does take longer with the Firefox plugin installed, because it gets so much more information for you, including: anchor text and total number of links on the page your link is on.

Domain Pop
http://www.domain-pop.com/
This site allows you to check each domain once every 5 days. (I know, you want to be able to check every 5 minutes, but instead of always checking your backlinks, work on one way link building instead!) This site shows you how many links total you have, how many domains and how many different IP’s your links are on. It also gives a basic breakdown of the pages on each domain that your links are on.

dnScoop’s Domain and Site Value Tool
http://www.dnscoop.com/
This tool tells you your domain’s age, your PageRank, whether or not the PageRank is valid, How many inbound links according to Yahoo, your Alexa traffic rank, the IP report which has all of the domains on that IP, the text Link Ads estimated Link Value, and an estimated “total site value”.

W3tool’s Backlink Checker
http://www.w3tool.com/backlink/
This tool is nice, because it lets you check up to 10 URLs at the same time. This is great for checking your main site and multiple internal pages, or simply checking your site against your competitor’s sites. It does not display’s Google’s links, but it does display Yahoo’s, AltaVista’s and Alltheweb’s.

LinkVendor’s Domain Popularity Analysis
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/domain-popularity.html
This tool searches Yahoo, and gives a domain-by-domain breakdown of a sample of the pages your link is found on. It also tells you the different IPs and to see each page’s PageRank, you need to register for the service and login. Everything else requires no registration.

1stSearchEngineRanking’s Link Popularity Tool
http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/link-popularity-tool/
This one tells your Alexa rank, your PageRank, and how many links you have on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The yahoo numbers seem to be a bit low, comparing it against searching Yahoo’s own Site Explorer. Either way, it’s a pretty conservative number for each site, so definitely a tool to use for weekly benchmarking.

Piloun’s WebInfo
http://www.piloun.com/info
This breaks down your Google PageRank and Alexa rank, the number of pages index in Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, and MSN. It also shows you the backlinks for Yahoo and google, although they use the “link:yoururlhere.com” method for Google, which doesn’t show accurate results.

WeBuildPages Free Backlink Checker
http://www.thelinkpop.com/index.php
This tool doesn’t accurately report the number of links Google sees. It does accurately display the number that Yahoo and AltaVista see. This is just a set of numbers, for a very quick check.

PageRankr
http://www.pagerankr.com/
This little tool tells you the PageRank, how many pages you have indexed in Google, and how many pages link to you for Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb, and AltaVista. This uses the “link:yoururl.com” method for Google, which doesn’t show accurate results.

Webmaster Toolkit’s Link Popularity Checker
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml
This basic tool, is about the same as PageRankr, showing you how many pages link to you for Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb, and AltaVista. They also use the “link:yoururl.com” method for Google, which doesn’t show accurate results.

Feel free to post a comment with a link to a resource that isn’t in this or the previous “Check your backlinks” post.

The following is a guest post from Nick Cristey; owner of Hannah Montana Zone – a Miley Cyrus fansite.

Amongst other ways of one way link building such as social bookmarking (preferably on “dofollow” sites) and article writing, blog comment posting is a popular one. If you don’t know that commenting on people’s blogs who do not use “nofollow” increases your backlinks, then start finding blogs that you can comment on as part of your link building campaigns (starting with Link Building Bible!)

There’s a Wordpress Plug-in that blog owners can place on their blog that searches a commenter’s RSS feed and posts the title of the most recent feed at the bottom of a blog post with a link to that post. This plug-in is called CommentLuv. Link Building Bible has just added it to their blog. It is a fantastic way for a blog owner to encourage comments on their blog.

The problem here is how to find relevant blogs on which to comment on – and of course Google comes to our aid!

Simply go to Google and type this in, replacing “Your Keyword” with, well, your keyword:

Your Keyword “Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you”

At the moment of writing this, there are 555,000 blogs that contain that bit of text, which is 555,000 blogs you can leave your comment on. By simply adding your keyword at the beginning of the search term, you can reduce this larger number to blogs relevant to your niche. For example, say we are targeting the keyword “Technology”. To find all the relevant blogs, type in Google:

Technology “Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you”

And we get about 200 blogs we can comment on. Assuming that our comments are not spam and add value to the blog post, that’s 400 backlinks for this one term (One for your anchor text link, and one for your most recent RSS feed)! Of course the above is a single niche example which is quite limited but you get the idea!

Now it’s time to change the term to our other niche related keywords we are targeting, and start commenting!

NOTE: When posting comments on other people’s blogs, do not spam. Make your comment helpful and useful to help preserve the “dofollow” community. (What is dofollow? Find out here.)

UPDATE: Easily find DoFollow blogs with CommentLuv on themwith our new DoFollow Blogs Search Engine, DoFollow Diver!

This is part three of the series about building internal links in order to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Part 3 is also Wordpress specific. If you have a regular site or another type of blog software, then this won’t apply. But, for those who do have a Wordpress blog, this is a must read. (If you do have a regular site, you can hardcode the concepts talked about in this post for the same benefits.)

If you have a regular site, subscribe to my RSS feed, because next week I will be discussing why using a blog on your site directly or an external blog is an excellent idea for internet marketing.

Another plug-in that is available that will help you to build more internal backlinks is the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (available here). As the title suggests, it generates a Sitemap for your blog. This isn’t an XML sitemap, which is generated for search engines to read your site better. It is an HTML sitemap that is generated, and updated, every single time that you write a new post, or add a new static page.

The benefit of having a site-wide link to the sitemap, and having the sitemap, is that every single page will link to the Sitemap, thereby passing more link juice to the sitemap, and then the Sitemap links out to every page on your site, passing that juice back to each page. This is a very simple way to have more internal backlinks for your site.

Since we are all interested in link building, using your site’s own page rank is a fantastic way to keep that page rank within your site. Yes, it is good to link to other sites too, but if you can balance that with building some internal links, that will help your site greatly. As I find more ideas and plug-ins for internal link building, I will be sure to share them with you all.

Please check out the other posts in this Internal Link Building series….

Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Prequel
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 1
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 2
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 3
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 4
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 5
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 6

This is part two of a series about building internal links in order to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Part 2 is Wordpress specific. If you have a regular site or another type of blog software, then this won’t apply. But, for those who do have a Wordpress blog, this is a must read. (If you do have a regular site, you can hardcode the concepts talked about in this post for the same benefits.)

If you want to get some easy, relevant, and a great amount of internal backlinks, then you need to download the Related Posts plug-in, available here. What this plug-in does, is add a few links at the bottom of each of your posts, that link to other posts that are similar to the one that you just wrote. The benefits of this are great.

The first benefit is internal linking with keyword rich text. If you write your titles with keyword rich text (which you should be doing), then using the Related Posts plug-in, you will get an internal link to that post with the keyword rich text that you chose originally. This will help that page (and all others that are listed with the Related Posts plug-in) to rank higher in the search engines.

The second benefit is that it can keep people on your site longer. If they like what you read and want to read more about that particular subject, then they will probably click one of the related posts provided by the Related Posts plug-in, which will keep them on your site longer (the benefits of having them on your site longer are obvious).

The third benefit is the authority that you will get from having those links on a related page. Having any backlink on any page is good. But, if you have a backlink on a page that has a subject related to the link, then it increases the value of that link. Therefore, when the plug-in generates the links, it generates a link that is relevant, and therefore a higher value link.

If you have a Wordpress blog, you need to install this plug-in. Not only will it allow you to build internal links, build higher value links, but it also allows your readers to find other posts you have written on a similar topic, keeping them on your page longer, and exposing them to more advertisements.

Please check out the other posts in this Internal Link Building series….

Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Prequel
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 1
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 2
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 3
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 4
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 5
Using Internal Linking to Build Backlinks – Part 6