Increasing Your PageRank

A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my blog had reached a PageRank of 0 in less than 30 days since having created it. I blogged about some of the things I believed that helped contribute to my rapid rise of a PageRank of 3. I’d like to share a few more strategies that I believe also helped to increase my PageRank.

FeedBurner

First of all, if your blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, I highly recommend you set one up with FeedBurner. I’m using the FeedBurner FeedSmith WordPress plugin to automatically redirect my feed to FeedBurner to ensure that everyone uses the FeedBurner feed. FeedBurner provides many nifty tools for customizing and analyzing your feed. You’ll definitely want to enable PingShot, which will automatically broadcast your feed to other feed aggregation services.

Social Networks

Join lots of social networks and link them with each other and your blog. You may find these particularly helpful in promoting your blog:

• MyBlogLog
• FriendFeed
• Twitter (I use the Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin to integrate with the blog)
• Technorati

Trackbacks and Commenting

Subscribe to feeds on popular blogs that blog about the same topics you do. For blogs that provide the ability to add comments, provide your feedback on the articles. When prompted for your information as you post your comment, be sure to provide the URL for your blog. If your comments are useful and constructive, you will get clicks from folks that want to learn more about you. Because you blog about the same topics, you will attract regular visitors to your site.

Most blogs put nofollow tags on the links that appear in comments. Unfortunately that means that the links won’t contribute to your PageRank. However, they will drive traffic to your site which really should be your primary goal. In addition to providing comments, some blogs also have trackbacks enabled. If you link to an article on a blog that has trackbacks enabled, a link to your article will appear within the article you linked to. As with comments, most sites with trackbacks also use nofollow links.

Another you can try for comments on your own blog is to disable nofollow in comments on your own blog (aka dofollow, which is my commenting policy). Although it doesn’t necessarily help to promote your site, it does give people some incentive to leave comments on your blog. Constructive discussion on your blog will provide additional credibility and attract new users. You will likely want to moderate comments so that you do not just have a bunch of people saying useless stuff like, “nice article!” You’ll also want to use a comment spam filter, such as Akismet. I was manually filtering spam on WealthBoy for a while. However, as the blog gained popularity with the spam bots, it became overwhelming. Akismet does a fabulous job of filtering spam.

Pinging Services

Traditionally, web search engines will crawl websites and pull information from them when they can. With the advent of blog pinging services, you can now push your content to other websites rather than wait for it to be pulled. Feedburner’s PingShot service does the same thing, but only with a select few services. You can ping many other services with the following comprehensive list:

• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://1470.net/api/ping
• http://api.feedster.com/ping
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://api.moreover.com/ping
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://bblog.com/ping.php
• http://bitacoras.net/ping
• http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
• http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
• http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://coreblog.org/ping/
• http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
• http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
• http://ping.amagle.com/
• http://ping.bitacoras.com
• http://ping.blo.gs/
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
• http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
• http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.myblog.jp
• http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.weblogs.se/
• http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
• http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
• http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
• http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
• http://rpc.newsgator.com/
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
• http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
• http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
• http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
• http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
• http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
• http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
• http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
• http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
• http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
• http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
• http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
• http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
• http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
• http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
• http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
• http://www.bloglines.com/ping

Most blogging platforms give you the ability to take advantage of pinging services (I’m using WordPress). I highly recommend using the list above and adding even more if you don’t see them on the list.

Feedburner, social networks, commenting, trackbacks, and pinging services are just a few more of the things I’ve done to get GeekLad off the ground. As I continue my quest on becoming an SEO expert, I’ll be sure to share tips on what you can do to help increase your PageRank.