I get asked this a lot, how to build quality links so your site gets a higher Pagerank and then scores better. There’s a lot of bad advice on this subject in the different marketing courses I’ve read. These are some zero cost ways to improve your search engine rankings.

1. Make sure your domain has the most important keywords in it, preferably in the front of the name. Search engines like Google place a lot of value in this.

2. Only post original content. If it’s a cookie cutter site don’t bother. It’s called the duplicate content policy and Google knows you’re just one of 1,000 similar sites.

3. Register the domain for five years, two at the minimum. Google sees that you’re more committed to the project. Spammers register for just one year and the longer the better. If you’re going to register it year to year anyway, may as well get the discount for doing five years now.

4. Post comments on Dofollow blogs. These are blogs setup to give you a real link the search engines can find, and helps build your pagerank. Do a Google search for “Dofollow blogs” and you’ll see many directories of them.

5. Go through the archives of dofollow blogs and post only on older articles that have at least Pagerank 1. Download the Google Toolbar and it’ll show you the pagerank of any given site you’re on. Posting on a bunch of PR zero articles just won’t move you along as fast. Make sure your comments are REALLY good and research the article first if you don’t know enough to post an intelligent comment.

6. If they have keywordluv installed, use it. It’s where you can change the anchor text of your comment so it gives a better link. Don’t use the same text in every post though, mix it up a little.

7. Spread out your comments, limit them to five a day or so. Too many links too fast can get you penalized on the search engines.

8. If it’s a blog with “Top Commenter” installed and it’s similar to yours, I’d put some effort into getting into that even if it’s not a dofollow blog. The top commenter links on the home page are Dofollow links, and if they have good pagerank it can be well worth the effort. Just make sure it’s a blog with a topic you know something about, and the comments are very high quality, funny, or both.

9. Don’t always link to your home page, link to other articles or pages you’ve done. Especially if going for top commenter, you don’t want all the links from one site going to the same page on your site. Mix it up a little.

10. Don’t forget to use the alt text on every image on your site. This was originally for browsers that couldn’t do graphics, so there’s an alternative text to enter for image properties. Google image search uses these and one webmaster I spoke with was getting 30% of his traffic from people doing image searches and arriving on his site. Keep them accurate though, or keyword focused on what that page is about.

I’d go into how your choice of web hosting really affects this, but there’s a previous article I wrote explaing it all. If you have any tips of your own, I’d appreciate you dropping a comment.