The Really Easy SEO Link Building Strategy For Startups

This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ which comes from one of the top agencies in the field.

In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.

If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.

I'm not a fan of blog commenting for link building. Most blogs use nofollow on the comments links, and that makes them near worthless (except on very high traffic blogs where comment links send meaningful traffic). Moreover, many blog comments are spam. You don't want to be sending the same signal as spammers to Google.

What I do like about this strategy isn't even mentioned about the author. Blog commenting can be a great way to start a conversation and a relationship with a blogger. Once you've done that, then you can get some real links instead of the crappy links in the blog comments section.

In my opinion this works only for products and services with an existing demand, i.e. in the worst case a copycat product, in the best case a product solving a very explicit problem. If your product/service is relatively innovative (i.e. for example 4square in their beginnings) and there is no explicit demand existing, these strategies won't help that much at all.

If SEO and link building/link earning was this easy, then everyone would be doing it and there would be no need for SEO firms. There would be no SEO industry. Companies wouldn't be hiring SEOs to do link earning for them.

Go ahead and try all of these methods described in that post and then see how well it works. Shortly thereafter you'll be contacting a good SEO firm to clean up the mess, remove bad links, and start creating content for you that earns you links.

I think this post focuses a little too much on the SEO aspect of this blog commenting strategy. While it is a good strategy for SEO, and it does work, I think the real benefit comes from becoming part of the community that is focused on whatever your startup is involved in. That exposure helps create customers/evangelists that will then help promote your product/service to others within their sphere of influence. The SEO is just an added benefit.

Wow, it's pretty amazing, but you've described one of the use cases for my upcoming webapp: www.alertoid.com

Technically, Alertoid would be an RSS reader that goes beyond the Read/Unread tagging, with the Commented/Comment Approved stages you described. Furthermore, it can be used for inbound marketing: as you monitor the keywords that interest you, you see the blog posts that mention them and can use those as starting points or ideas for your own blog posts, because if bloggers love comments, they love answer posts or reposts even more, and it's another great way to start a conversation and get backlinks.

/shameless plug

Hope my pitch was clear enough, don't hesitate if you have any feedback. If you're interested by Alertoid, email's in my profile, would love to hear from you, even more if you're a marketing/PR professional.

Feedback on SERPIQ: I just signed up, on the confirmation page (http://serpiq.com/users/sign_up) I see "You have signed up successfully. However, your need to confirm your email address." but a signup form is still there, empty, as if nothing worked. That doesn't seem right!

Firstly I think I should point out that, I have previously used manual blog commenting to rank for highly competitive keywords.

The strategy was extremely effective however, it isn’t any more and doing SEO this way isn’t a strategy your startup should adopt.

Google Penguin and to some extent Panda, were brought in to stop this kind of SEO and some of the changes they made have been very effective in stopping the effectiveness of this type of Grey-Hat SEO.

Similarly, your startup is probably on a new domain & with the changes to Google Penguin/Panda to ensure you aren’t sandboxed the first 500-1000 links you acquire are extremely important. By doing Grey Hat SEO – blog commenting, directories, article sites you are putting yourself at risk of getting your site placed in the sandbox.

After that you’re probably going to get a manual review and that is something you don’t want & if you don’t think Google Penguin is effective, then don’t but Google are going to keep making Penguin smarter & more aggressive about punishing sites that have built non-authentically earned links.

Additionally if you’re an E-Commerce startup a completely different SEO approach is needed & blog commenting is definitely not the way to do it (as is the case for any startup).

Very cool, but instead of tracking your keywords only in google, why not use http://mention.net or some other similar tool?

There's an even easier strategy and it can be very successful: use your company blog to write generic startup fluff for HN even if it's irrelevant to your company and users or customers, which it will be almost 100% of the time.

Edit: I'm not referring to the author's blog.

GitHub Wikis have tons of lists of 'Apps using this library'. That, right there, is lots of link juice and promotion if you use a lot of open source libraries.