When you start a blog, you’re incredibly excited and you start to really cram out the content. I can remember when I started my first blog, I had time stamped about four articles and I was writing more and more. The first few articles were published and I waited…waited…waited…And no traffic came. So I tried some more articles and I waited…The same thing happened. Now, when I started this blog, I was brand new in blogging. Since then, though, I have determined what my problem was: no one could find me.

But, not only could people not find me, search engines could not find me. When you’re running any kind of website, whether it is a forum, blog, or content site, you want the search engines to find you. They bring the traffic that is going to click ads and sign up for affiliate offers far more than any other kind of lead to your site. I realized this and went in search of some information to try and increase my ‘findability.’ I realized that I needed to build links to get people to my blog. However, I also needed to use the right keywords.

What I pieced together was a series of steps that I felt would increase my ‘findability.’ They’re not full proof as nothing in this world is, but they are an effective method in increasing the number of backlinks you receive as well as increasing your keyword rankings in the search engines. Take from this list as you please. However, here are some methods to increase both:

• Join a couple of forums in your niche and put a link to your blog in your signature. However, not only are you going to put the link in your signature, you’re going to use the anchor text (keywords) that you want to rank for on the search engines.

• When you write a blog post that is really good, send an e-mail to the authorities in your niche and let them know that you wrote it. Sometimes, they are looking for ideas and they’ll link back to you for giving them an idea.

• Another thing to do when you write an awesome post is submit it to an authority blog in your niche for a guest blog post. By doing this, you’re getting on their blog, but you’re using the keyword YOU want rather than the one that they think you may want.

• Comment a minimum of ten times a day on different blogs. I found that if I commented on different blogs at least ten times a day, I would start to become a part of the communities and people would know who I was.

• Consider holding a contest. By holding a contest, you’re going to determine how they can win. If you’re link building, tell them that to be entered in the contest, they need to link to you with the keyword you want. My advice, though, is to have a couple of keywords rather than one.

• Finally…Consider having a budget and going out to purchase some links. If you purchase the right links, you can really get the ‘findability’ that you want as well as the ranking in the search engines. But, do it the right way else suffer the great Google Ban!

The trick to getting good backlinks and strong keywords is to be in control. Pick a few keywords that you want to rank for. Also, don’t JUST link to your homepage. If you wrote a very cool article, link to that article with a very specific (or not so specific) keyword. By doing this, you’ll get traffic to individual blog posts and not just the main blog.

All in all, what you want to do is make it so people and search engines can find you. By using the above steps, what you are guaranteeing is that you are increasing your backlinks and, on top of that, making sure that the keywords you rank for in the search engines are the ones that you want to maximize traffic. By doing this, you’re going to really increase your exposure to the blogosphere. Try it out…See what happens.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

Used by webmasters and bloggers alike, blog commenting is a highly used technique of generating traffic. Blog comments usually spark some type of conversation between the blogger and reader, and will even include other readers as well. As there are many blogs to comment on, and many conversations going on at once, sometimes it can get hard to keep track of them all. Yes, there are comment feeds, but they feed you all the comments made across an entire blog, and you probably won’t won’t to follow that. There are also check boxes below the comment box on some blogs that allow you to be Emailed every time someone posts a new comment on that post. These are really great, but not every blog has them. So, what do you do when there’s no “Email Me” check box? The answer is simple; coComment.

coComment is a service that allows you to track your blog comments, and even forum posts. It is available as a Firefox add-on, which makes it all the more easier to use. If you use Internet Explorer, then you’ll have to manually add each comment to your coComment account, which will be very monotonous, and almost a waste of time.

coComment doesn’t just track you comments, it also allows you to share them with friends, and even discover new posts to comment on yourself. I haven’t had any good discoveries there, yet, but who knows, maybe you’ll find some. The sharing feature is pretty cool, too. It can be used like a social bookmarking system, but more privately social, if you know what I mean.

Zac Davis is almost your typical teenage geek.  He has is own blog (Zac’s Blog), and enjoys browsing the “interwebz” for new and exciting things.  Of course, he also likes to write as well.  While not on the computer, he is either at school or playing soccer.