In order to promote your links, your main goal should be getting targeted traffíc to your site and any link PR should be secondary. Always put the reader or viewer first, especially if it's on someone else's site. Don't talk about your site or your marketing - just join the conversation and add your comments/opinions/suggestions... Enhance their site and they will reward you with traffic and a link. But you still have to keep your interests in the equation! You have to make sure you get your targeted keywords in the anchor text.
Keyword Market
First, if you've done your homework, your main keywords should already be in your domain name or url. Another way is to add your "keywords" + "guide" to your sig or signature. Such as: Name, Your Antique Cars Guide. If you're an expert in your particular niche, many webmasters will kindly welcome your comments and links.
Since your main goal is the traffic, many webmasters don't worry if there is a "no follow" attribute attached to the link. But if you are concerned about this - one way is to look at the source code to see if it has the "no follow" tag. I usually copy the whole source code of the page to my text editor and then do a simple "no follow" search.
No Follow
There is also a great little free comment tool called "Comment Kahuna" co-created by Jason Potash which will search blogs and tell you if they have the "no-follow" attribute or not, it will also give you the PageRank of each blog post. If you're going to use blogs as a source of your backlinks, I suggest you try Comment Kahuna - it will make the task much easier and it's free.
Actually, while the "no-follow" issue may be a concern for some webmasters, the savvy ones will realize these are links/sites Google is actively indexing and spidering, otherwise you wouldn't get the alert in the first place. You must get your links into this whole mix of related, relevant sites to help raise your rankings. Also remember the other search engines may not even consider the "no-follow" tag.
Trackbacks
Likewise, creating trackbacks are another way of linking relevant content. Keep in mind, a trackback is simply an acknowledgement via a ping signal that is sent from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor). Then the receptor often places a link back to Site A showing its worthiness.
Again, I am mainly concerned with the quality of the blog or link, rather than the linking structure. I want the targeted traffíc, and it doesn't really matter whether the link has "no follow" because interested visitors only see a link they can click for other helpful information.
Other Linking Options
Since we are on the topic of link building, another useful way to build backlinks is to use Google Search or Google Blog search. Now if you're looking for niche-related blogs just type in:
"(Keywords)" "powered by (blog scripts)"
For example, if you're looking for some "antique cars" related links on WordPress blogs, you would search for:
"antique cars" "powered by wordpress"
And Google would give you a whole líst of sites on antique cars.
Now if you want to find the links that will allow comments, just repeat the Google search with:
"antique cars" "powered by wordpress" "leave a comment" -"no comments"
Remember the "-" means posts that have no comments will not be displayed. If you're concerned with PageRank, Number of Backlinks, Alexa Ranking... of particular posts you can download and install the SEOQuake plugin. This handy SEO plugin can be attached to your browser and will give you helpful SEO information on the link or links you're viewing.
Used in conjunction with Google, it can sort thru all these blog posts and give you the ones with the highest PR? Highest traffic? Highest number of backlinks? The more knowledge you have, the easier and more effective your link building will become.
Please see my post regarding commenting for more information.
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I have tried Comment Kahuna, but found Fast Blog Finder a much more valuable tool to use. If only more people went dofollow and showed appreciation for comments on their blog, it would be a much easier job to get links to your blog. Fo course, stopping spam would help too, then there would be no need for nofollow in the first place.
hmmmm.... interesting. Let me give Fast Blog Finder a try. thx for the comments