Want to learn how to expand your network and drive up rankings at the same time?

Last Traffic Tuesday, we discussed how guest blogging can help you promote your business and even give you the ability to expose your practice to other professionals and potential clients in your field by making your brand and voice of expertise more visible in the highly trafficked world of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

This week, we’ll discuss how blog commenting can serve similar purposes in addition to driving traffic to your site via direct links in your comments as well as the ensuing search engine optimization rankings benefits that arise.

Commenting on blogs, while a helpful marketing strategy, is not a task that should fill up your entire workday and needs to be done according to certain specifications in order drive traffic to your website more effectively.

In order for commenting on a blog to be a worthwhile method of getting users to click through to your site, you need to make certain that the blog is highly visible, relevant to the content on your own website, and receptive to your backlinking. You also need to make sure that the blog has a "Do Follow" status which means that search engines will "count" the links rather than ignore them.

Here are some tips to make your blog commenting as productive and time-efficient as possible.

First, don’t spend hours looking for irrelevant blogs. A quick way to locate ones that relate to you is to simply Google a few of your main keywords + "blog".

Along with perusing the content on the blogs you find to make sure they correspond with your own content, you should also check the Google "page rank" of each site.

Google assigns a page rank on an ascending scale running from one to ten. The higher the page rank the better. Posting on a zero pagerank site won’t necessarily hurt you, but it’s better to write one comment on a blog with a pagerank of five rather than to leave posts on half a dozen zero pagerank sites.

Now, one more detail to verify before posting a comment:

Check to see if the setting of the blog is Do Follow or No Follow. If it is No Follow, people can still click on the link but it will not boost your SEO as it essentially tells Google to disregard the link (ie. you get no search engine boost).

Having a blog which is set to "Do Follow" allows that link to your site to count in your favor, and thus makes a blog with this setting more valuable.

There are numerous toolbars and plug-ins that will instantly indicate page rank, Follow status, and a variety of other details about a given blog to help you decide if it’s promising posting ground.

The MozBar from SEO Moz gives you all the basics.

If you want more guidance, check out www.seoTimetable.com which has a more detailed 120 plan for doing SEO on your own.