Using blog comments to generate back links to your site is becoming more and more prevalent.

There are a lot of people out there that will tell you don't bother to use blog comments because all the blogs have no follow tags now and the search engines don't record the links.

There is a trace of truth to this but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use blog comments to get back links because there are some blogs that don't have the no follow tags on their comments.

WordPress by default adds the no follow tags to the comment section but there are people that will remove the no follow tags from your comments in return for you leaving comments. Believe it or not there is a way you can find these blogs with a search.

Go out and post your comments on these blogs but before you do I want to make sure you aren't leaving spammy comments so here is some blog comments etiquette.

If you are going to leave a comment on the blog MAKE SURE the comment is relevant to the post.

If the post you are commenting on is about writing articles you don't want to leave a comment about extreme sports. If you site is extreme sports related you can have the link to your site but the comment text needs to be related to the post.

When you are writing your comments don't put any links in the body of the comment. Not only is this poor etiquette it can actually get you listed on the comment spam lists if you are reported by the blog owners. You can put a link in the comment body if, and only if, it is a resource to something in the post.

I personally have my comments set up so that if you put links in the body of the comment it will go to moderation and not be posted until I get around to reviewing the links. This might be done quickly or it might take me a week to get to it. Remember, some people never check the comment moderation.

Now your name or I should say the form field where you enter your name. This should be your name or your moniker. For example I will use Randy The Hermit because more people know me that way than by my normal last name. Your moniker can have keywords in it (only helps if there are not any no follow tags) but it should be related to you or what you do. For example if you teach people how to blog you could use the moniker Blog Boy or Blogging Teacher but your moniker should stay the same no matter what you use for a link.

That is a general overview of blog etiquette but you should never do anything in a blog comment that you wouldn't want done on your blog. Even with the no follow tags you should still be posting comments, I bet you are wondering why?

There are a few reasons why you should leave comments even if there are no follow tags, such as:

1.With or without the no follow tag it is still a link to your site. You can get over 1000 links to your site by leaving 5 comments a day for a year. These links will be seen by 1000's of people that might come to your site.

2.If you comments adds value to the topic of the post the author and readers will start to recognize your name and you will be branding yourself as an expert.

3.If your comment is informative you will also find that a lot of the readers will click on your link to find out more about you.

4.Some of the ad services and search engines, like Ask (the last time I checked) don't read the no follow tag. With the ad services this means that you site will look more relevant and it could lead to higher pay outs on your ads.

If comments have the no follow tag activated how do you tell?

One way is to go to the blog and find a post with comments and look at the page source, find the comment and see if it has no follow tag on the link. This is a pain but it works.

The good news is that you don't have to do it that way. If you are using FireFox or Flock as your browser you can get an addon that will highlight all the no follow tags on a page. It is called SEO for FireFox and you can get it from SEOTools.com or you can search SEO for FireFox addon in Google.

This addon will give you a bunch of information that can be used for SEO but the one feature that we are interested in now is the no follow highlighting. What it does is look at all the links on the page your viewing and highlights all the no follow links in red. If the name in the blog comment isn't red then the no follow is shut off on that blog.

Then there is another plugin that some people add to their WordPress blogs that will reward the frequent commenter. It is called Lucia's Linky Love.

After they install this plug in the blog master can set it so that the no follow tag will be removed from the comments for people that comment a certain number of times.

It does require that you use the same name and the same email address for every comment (I believe I mentioned using the same name above).

Most commonly this is set at 3 to 5 posts before the no follow tags are removed but the blog master can set if from 3 to a million if they like.

How do you find blogs that use Lucia's Linky Love plugin? The easiest way is to use Google's Blogsearch, put your keywords in quotes and then put a plus sign and then Lucia's Linky in quotes and do you search. It should look something like this "keyword phrase"+"Lucia's Linky" you results should sow you posts that are related to your keywords and using Lucia's Linky Love plugin.

On my blogs I usually have this set at three and I review the comments on a regular basis any comments that read like pure spam I delete. Because I delete them the spammers never get to the magic number of three and the no follow stays in place. This leads to more comments that are usually more informative.