So, welcome to a new little series on my blog. Introducing Blogger Tips – coming to you every Friday, to fill you with motivation to improve your blog over the weekend!
On my trip to Peru, I had lots of time away from the internet. This gave me an oportunity to think about what I want from my blog and the motivation to give it the push it needed. Since returning I’ve been working really hard to turn my blog into my own little corner of the internet where I can express myself and be exactly who I want to be. As well as sprucing up my layout, I have put in a little extra effort to work on things like my SEO, my Google Pagerank, followers and pageviews and have been really pleased to see some good results so far. So, I thought it might be a nice idea to share with you a few techniques on what I’ve been doing.
Today we are going to talk about increasing your Google Pagerank. You can check your pagerank using this handy tool. I’ve heard your pagerank doesn’t update very often so don’t be disheartened if it’s not what you expected it to be. However, from my experience PR’s do look at it when deciding on reviews, sponsored posts etc. so in my opinion it’s a good thing to work on. Plus, the higher your page rank, the more page views you’ll generate, so it’s a win/win situation – right?
Before we start, I also just want to point out that I’m by no means an expert, I’ve just researched this myself and tried a few different techniques – I’m sure there are loads more, this is just what has worked for me.
I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful!
As Blogging Tips is a new series here on the blog, please do get in touch via the comments below, or twitter, with any topics, blogging tips or questions you may have and I’ll do my best to answer them in future posts 🙂
Here are my top tips:
1. High Quality Content – the most important tip is to have readable, engaging, good quality content. It’s so important to keep your readers engaged to ensure they keep coming back time and time again and continue to follow your blog. Also if you post helpful or shareable information, people will want to share this over social media, allowing your blog following to grow naturally.
2. Post Regularly – content needs to be kept fresh and unique to score the highest page ranking, so make sure to update regularly. This is great as posting frequently will keep your readers interested too. This doesn’t mean you need to continually churn out posts every day, 3-4 times a week seems ideal, but even once a week will be fine too. Again, having high quality content is so much more important than hundreds of short spammy posts.
3. Internal Linking – Make sure your posts include links to other parts of your site, for example when I’m talking about my Peru adventures I might mention my night in Lake Titicaca (with a link to that page). Also, the ‘popular posts’ and ‘posts you might like’ widgets are fabulous for this too. For internal links it’s best to use the keywords, rather than terms like ‘click here’ or ‘check this out’. Internal links help to reduce your bounce rate by keeping the reader engaged on within your site, this all helps.
4. Keywords – are so important! Make sure your keywords are written within the post title, it’s also beneficial to include them within your blog post, although don’t overdo it as it may come across as unnatural.
5. Create and build backlinks – Backlinks are something google loves, the more people you have linking to your site, the more Google will think you have high quality and interesting content. There are so many ways to create backlinks for your blog but here are a few of my favourites:
- Guest blogging
- Networks, forums and groups (especially if your your blog link is used within your signature)
- Working with brands who include your link on their page
- Writing interesting content people will want to share
However, a word of warning – There are many companies who will claim they can increase your backlinks – be careful of these as they can result in 1000’s of spam links, and lets face it Google is a clever little stick and will know you’ve cheated.
6. Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing – This is something I have only just done (doh!). Submitting your sitemap allows the search engines ‘spiders’ to map your site and learn where your interesting content is.
As Blogging Tips is a new series here on the blog, please do get in touch via the comments below, or twitter, with any topics, blogging tips or questions you may have and I’ll do my best to answer them in future posts 🙂
