Here we discussed what page ranking was, and here we discussed how Google determines your page ranking. Now let’s figure out how to raise your Google ranking.
As I already said, Google rewards people for incoming links, and the high ranked the page is that is linking to you, the more Google rewards you. So it seems like it would only make sense to go after the really high ranking blogs (a 6 or higher) and ignore everyone else. Although this makes sense on the surface, it doesn’t actually work, because a high ranking blog will be inundated with requests for links every day. They don’t have the time or the website space to link to everyone who wants it. So you’ve always got to start out at the bottom, with the people who are on equal footing with you. If you have a 0 page ranking, search for other blogs in your same topic, and then really check them out. If they have a 0 or 1 page ranking and wrote a great blog, leave a comment in the comment section saying so, and sign your name with your website address under your name. Everywhere I comment at, I sign my name:
Hava
http://members.families.com/havalyon/blog
with the website underneath my name. This not only allows the owner of the blog to know who you are and your website address, but also other readers of the same blog, which means that you’ll get some traffic from doing this. And don’t just put, “Great blog!” and sign your name or worse yet, “Great blog – check out mine!” and sign your name. This is considered a spammy comment and most blogs will either delete the comment or ignore it. Really respond to what was said in the blog and either agree and say why, or disagree and say why. Be friendly, supportive, and genuine. They will like what they read, come over to your blog, check it out, be impressed, and end up linking to it.
That’s the plan anyway. 😉 Notice how the plan’s success hinges on you actually have a great blog. None of this will do you a bit of good if your blog is spammy and worthless, because no one will link to a blog like that.
And for good measure, if you really loved the blog, write up a blog of your own talking about what you found on this other blog, and link to it. I have often said in a comment section, “I loved what you said! I had never thought about it that way. Thanks for the insightful blog – I loved it so much, in fact, that I’m going to go write a blog on my site highlighting your blog because I think my readers would really enjoy it. Thanks for all of your hard work!” or something similar. This instantly tells the blog owner that you not only liked the blog enough to comment (and the comment to reader ratio is horribly low – I will usually get one comment per 100 readers, so any comments are usually very welcome, at least by me, and by almost every other site out there) but you also liked the blog enough to highlight it on your own site. This will give the blog owner warm fuzzies, and you’ve most likely just scored a link to your own site.
The true key here is to be genuine – if you copy and paste the same comment into each blog, and highlight a ton of blogs on your site and say the same thing about each of them, you will be ignored and shunned by the blogging community. Bloggers can spot spammer a mile away, I promise. 😉
So should you out and out ask for a link from another website? Read on to find out the answer!
This was part of a series on blogging. If you haven’t read the other entries in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all blogging articles. Comments and feedback are always welcome – feel free to leave them below or send me an e-mail at Hava L {at} Families dot com. Thanks for reading!