More Simple and Easy SEO to Increase Your Pagerank

Some time ago, I signed up for a nifty little service called Pagerankster. It’s a free service that provides you with email alerts when your PageRank changes. I had almost forgotten I had signed up, until I received an alert this morning that GeekLad reached PageRank 5!

GeekLad.com went from no PageRank to a PageRank 3 within less than 30 days.  Although I hadn’t written a blog post about it, the site also managed to reach PageRank 4 within three months.  I think the main reason I was able to hit PageRank 5 was by taking a page out of the book of my good friend at Blog Traffic Exchange.

I thought that reaching PageRank 3 in less than 30 days was pretty cool, but Blog Traffic Exchange managed to hit PageRank 5 in less than 30 days!  How did he do it?  It’s a pretty stupid simple but ingenious strategy.

He simply developed a few nice WordPress plugins that would display backlinks to his site on blogs that would install them. One thing that is great about this strategy is that it’s much easier than mutual blogrolling.  There’s no having to send “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” type emails. Your back gets scratched when people install your plugin and you don’t have to scratch back.

The other great thing about this strategy is the same thing that makes mutual blogrolling so great. You receive a backlink from every page on the blog in which it is installed.  I decided to try my hand at putting together a PageRank widget plugin (you’ll see it on all my pages).  I shamelessly put a link to the plugin page on the widget, and it wasn’t long before the backlinks started flowing in.

Generating backlinks to a blog is really quite simple, and it doesn’t take all that much effort to quickly improve your PageRank.  Here are some of the things I suggest you try:

• Mutual Blogrolling
• Use Disqus as your comment system
• Syndicate your content with RSS feeds
• Create WordPress plugins that link to your page
• Create badges that link to your page

Of course PageRank isn’t the be-all and end-all for achieving high-ranking results in search engine result pages (SERPs).  Owen from The Linux Blog made an interesting comment about better results on SERPs with a lower PageRank.  His PageRank has bounced around a bit, and although it is lower, his blog is syndicated in many places which he believes has helped him to achieve a higher ranking in the SERPs.

I’d say that for the most part, the strategies I’ve discussed and have used are relatively straight-forward.   It is really common sense more than anything, but I’m not so sure that many people use blogrolling and plugins as primary strategies for SEO.  As Voltaire says, “common Sense is not so common.”  I will continue to share my observations on SEO as I come across new strategies.  Stay tuned.