This is the second part of my series of articles examining how to practically and ethically improve the search engine rankings of your blog. In this installment, I’m going to look at how links of an external and internal nature can help your blog climb the dizzy heights of .
Everybody knows that back links to your sites, from other sites, are the major factor in determining a sites page rank. Google’s philosophy is that the more links you have coming from other sites the more reliable yours is. The problems with this method are innumerable, but the one that applies most in our case is the question of how new sites accumulate back links and make the most of them.
There are so many ways to establish link backs that I could write for months on the topic, but there are certain methods which really stand out in the context of blogging, the foremost being Social Bookmarking. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have long been the staple of traffic for a mass of techy blogs, but recently they’ve been diversifying their models to include topics which suit a much broader audience.
Submitting new posts to these sort of sites should be the first thing you do once hitting publish. They provide you with ample room to include a keyword rich title and description which Googlebot can harvest and dine out on and also provide a healthy traffic boost themselves. The key thing about this method is that it pivots on the strength of the community, if you submit an article to Digg and it makes it onto the front page, it’s much more likely to be indexed and assigned a higher Pagerank than if it lingers in the ass of nowhere without getting noticed, so make sure you’re promoting your best content to ensure it’s liked. It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of social bookmarking sites don’t appreciate you submitting your own content, so try to get your friends, or better still readers, to do it for you 
Another method often used that hangs on the idea of reaching communities is commenting on blogs. This has been a favourite method for ages, blog spam is rife these days, but guess what… It’s absolutely pointless and just plain annoying. The majority of blogs now use nofollow links, so while you may get a bit of traffic from people reading your comment, it will have no SEO benefit as Google has been instructed to ignore the link. I still recommend leaving