How My Blog Got a Page Rank 5

Ok, as almost everyone I know already heard, (I made sure to tell them every 5 min or so…) a few days ago, my less then 3 months old blog got page rank 5 from Google.

I know page rank is overated and I certainly don’t think that page rank is the ultimate criteria for a site’s quality, but there are a few good things that come with page rank so I decided to try and list why I think I got such a high page rank fron Google.

Relevancy

When I first started this SEO Blog it was as part of the clifinar competition I wrote here about. At that time there were no Clifinar related search results. Now, after Google indexed some 36,100 results on this word it decided my blog is very relevant to the term:

My SEO blog is called the Clifinar SEO blog, and if you look at my tag cloud you can see that it’s still one of the most used word in my posts (I didn’t get around to change it yet, and maybe it’s good).

Also, at some point during the competition I received a few inbound links that were all using the word Clifinar in the anchor text.

My blog is also constantly updated, if not with new posts or pages then by small edits to the content, fixing typing errors or new features I try to add – like my SEO Polls.

Quality Content

My posts are, for the most part, not too short or too stuffed with keywords and links. I also have a few static pages on my blog that have quite a lot of content and are SEO friendly. I don’t know if they contribute very much to the overall score but they certainly don’t hurt.

As a matter of principle I try not to write anything unless I really have something to say. This makes my posts interesting enough to keep the few visitors on my blog for long enough to make Google consider my content relevant both to my visitors and the tags I added to the post.

On Page Optimization

There are a few basic rules in SEO that it is advisable to keep when writing content to a site or blog. here are a few of them:

Have a relevant, SEO friendly URL – in wordpress the post’s title becomes the URL but this can be eddited. So if you have a long title you should probably make the URL shorter. In my blog most of the URLs weren’t changed but you shouldn’t be afraid to make it “nicer” for the search engines. Just remember that pople have to read it too.

Internal links building- Links from your page have power if you know how to use them. You should use links to give power to other pages on your site. For example linking from one post to another on your blog. This let’s the search engines know there is connection between the post and, more importantly, it let’s visitors go from one post to another keeping them on your site for a longer time.

Outgoing links – Search engines like to see that you’re not afraid to pot links that send visitors to other sites as well. It helps if those sites are considered an authority in your domain. This shows you are not afraid to loose visitors and that you know that your content is good enough to keep people coming back. I’m not saying you should link to your competitors but you can link to sites like Wikipedia or to a post on the Google blog.

Don’t over do things- just because you can link to a page doesn’t mean you have to. Having too many links on one page is bad for both SEO purposes and for the visitors. If you have to many links the search engines will look on your page as spam. There is also a bigger chance of losing visitors that way.

There are other things you can do like using Google’s webmaster tools to make your site more search engines friendly and asking other pople what they think of your site to make it more people friendly. But that’s something for a different post. Maybe…