I'm starting to build a site in the real estate vertical. I want to start building links, but don't know what is a good long term strategy vis-a-vis short term. For example, commenting on follow blogs seems like an established tenet, but part of me is hesitant. There are tons other examples of link building that isn't as organic as it should. Any thoughts are much appreciated.
Blog commenting is a waste of time, all the best blogs are now nofollow and the good ones that are still dofollow are either spammed with 1000s of OBLs or the admin never approve the comments. Blog commenting is only white hat if you have a genuine interest in the post and post a constructive comment. I consider white hat as links you get by providing something good, like submitting articles or creating a website that's so good people want to link to it from their website. it starts to go a bit grey when you start forum profiles etc but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
do you think forum profiles are effective for link building or driving relevant traffic? i looked at your signature - after your write the articles, how much will it cost to submit to those 20 news sources?
not for driving relevant traffic but they're an easy source of backlinks for SEO - I've got some adsense minisites ranking #1 from purely forum links, you need to get to know which sites you can get your profile page indexed in Google on. If you just pay a VA to build angela's packets that is not going to work - it takes more than that. the service in my signature includes the 20 submissions, if you want more info on that please PM me, I'm not subscribed to this thread so probably won't see your reply.
White hat means your not manipulating the search engine. All links are white hat. But if you start spamming 1000's of un natural links it isn't natural. You can use forum profiles but if you sign upto 100,000 forums to get links thats not very natural. If you participate on a blog and contribute and leave comments on similar blogs thats totally fine.