How I Got a Google PR5 in 90 Days

A Google page rank of 5 isn't impressive, but in the blogging community this seems to be the rank that separates the wheat from the chaff. I obtained a Google PR5 in only about three months after the blog was started, and I believe this success is based on a few deliberate "white hat SEO" choices I had made up front. These choices were, in no particular order:

1. Networking. I've found that especially StumbleUpon, Thoof, Reddit, and Fark have drawn traffic to my blog. There's also Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us, of course, and while you may not get traffic from those sites unless you're lucky enough to get dugg, Google will notice the links to your site.
2. Participate on message boards and other people's blogs. (This is also networking, of course.) Make shameless self-promotion with a link to an article that you wrote, or use trackbacks if the other person's blog allows them. Have a link to your blog in your signature and your profile.
   
3. Blog bait in the form of provocative articles. Don't be overly provocative (writing a pro-Nazi article will probably draw traffic, but something tells me your site might be placed in a category that won't improve your page rank), but say something that sounds profound using effective rhetoric. My article, Survival Tips: Lessons in Misanthropy quickly became a "buzz" on StumbleUpon, for example. People will share these articles and link to them.
4. Blog bait in the form of little applications, tips, and tricks. I wrote some plugins for Joomla and some plugins and hacks for Movable Type, and made them free for everyone with the license requirement that they link to my blog. Little "how-to" posts explaining how you did something in PhotoShop or on your Linux machine can also draw traffic.
   
5. Blog bait in the form of humor and satire. Readers love to be entertained.
   
6. Valuable and well-written articles. I wrote something about this in an earlier post. I'm sure you can do with less than philosophical high-brow articles, but they should provide some insight in a nice wrapping, that is, something that other people will actually look for and use. Make sure your articles include words that you anticipate people will search for. If in doubt, see which tags similar high-ranking articles have received on Technorati and other aggregator sites and use them in your posts as appropriate.
   
7. Include graphics in your articles. Google indexes the images, and I suspect they have a positive effect in Google's page ranking algorithms. In any even't, quite a few of the blog hits are caused by Google's image search.
   
8. Submit your site to the search engines. Also configure your blog ping the various blog search engines out there. (You probably knew this already.)
   

Finally, there's actually an unused number 9 in the above list that may partly explain why "Survival Tips" became so popular. It is a blog bait where you compile a list of "top-ten" or "top-fifty" (or top-anything) of whatever you choose. For example, you may visit a variety of quotes pages and copy some quotes you like on a specific topic. Then when you have the desired number of quotes, make a blog post that says "Top 50 Republican Quotes" (or, equivalently, "Top 50 Dumbest Quotes Ever") or something, and your post is probably bound to become popular. I have written a few blog posts with enumerated suggestions, but since none of them were entitled "Top-blank," I don't know how effective these top-n lists are yet.

It seems that Google is currently lowering the page ranks of sites that have paid content. As of this writing, this blog has not yet included any paid posts, and considering my plans to include paid content in the future, I can expect the page rank to drop. However, I imagine that the page ranking algorithms consider the ratio between paid content and non-paid content so I'm not too worried about that.