Boosting Blog Rankings

Tonight I decided to catch up on all the blogs that I follow and also read all responses to my comments, which I found quite by accident (by logging into wordpress.org which I am discovering is waaaay different from wordpress.com).  I was going to read a particular blog and got lazy and typed her web address without the “.com” part and I was redirected to this websiterecord.com site.  I found it to be kind of interesting so I looked up my web and now want to discuss as some things I learned tonight just by going to this site by accident.

1-Since my page is ranked greater than 100,000 there is no historical data available.  In other words, I am not important enough on the web to even measure me.  What an ego killer.  LOL  😦

2-My blog is considered legit and not used for phishing…no surprise there  🙂

3- there are no websites similar to mine…in other words, no copy cats out there.  That’s good to hear.  🙂

4- Meta data shows no website description nor keywords.  That was not good to hear.  That has to be fixed 😦

5- Next section deals with how many people search for my blog by name.  The number is so low its not even tracked.  I can tell you that there are 3 people who search for it everyday by name because it comes up in my stats.  It has to be someone who puts in acitygirlscountrydream in the search engine instead of adding the .com and going to it directly.  I know plenty of people who still do that.  Whatever way you get here is fine.  😦

6- My web ranking is 15,331,350….  15 million out of all the sites in the world?  I am not sure if that is good or bad but for a beginner I am thinking it is not terrible.  😐

7- I have 18 back-links.  That means that 18 sites have linked to me somewhere.  I know all the people I link to did not link to me but that’s okay. I know I read about all these linky parties on other blogs and never understood why it meant so much for them to be linked on another blog.  Now I know the more back-links you have the higher your ranking.  I guess Facebook links don’t  count?  Apparently not.  😦

8- Page rank is 1.  I was happy about that until I read that the range is 1-10 with 10 being the highest.  😦

6- I am not listed in the DMOZ.  😦  Until now I had no idea what that is.  Now I do and I will get it listed

7-It goes again to back-links, but this time history.  It says on Aug 30 I had the largest number.  I can already tell you without looking, that is probably the day I wrote about either the Moroccan blankets or ceiling draping because most of my hits are searches in these two categories and I have seen links to my blog on those two subjects.

This means a little info on back-links is needed.  I looked it up and found:

• Backlinks are links to your site and the more you have the more popular you appear to be.  The more popular you are the more traffic Google and other engines send to you.  I guess their logic is if people are linking to you, you must have something people want to read.   Then they rank the relevance of the links to your site.  The more relevant the more they consider its dependance.  For instance if tool blogs are linking to my DIY blog thats major to Google but if lets say if an exercise blog is linking to me and I have nothing on here about fitness it means nothing to Google.  The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

• Search engines want webmaster to play fair.  They figure that it is easy for us to manipulate links but it is harder to trick the webcrawlers if they are finding backlinks so more importance is given to them. Some webmasters use tricks like hiding links or automatically creating pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to their websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned.  Ewwwl.

• If you are like me then that last statement probably made you think about all those linking parties you see on other blogs.  wellllll that is called reciprocal linking. Many bloggers use reciprocal link exchanges to boost their site’s rankings with inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.  The lesson with that is to be careful with reciprocal links. There is a Google patent in the works that will deal with not only the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad website. We need to be choosier with who we exchange links with. By choosing only relevant sites to link with, and sites that don’t have tons of outbound links on a page we will have a better chance that our reciprocal links won’t be discounted.  So you fellow bloggers out there, be careful who you  link with.

• If you own seven related websites, and place a link to each of those websites that can hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine like you are trying to do something fishy. …don’t do it!!

So to sum it all up I learned:

•  It is helpful to keep track of your backlinks and to know which sites are linking back to you, and how that backlink incorporates keywords relating to your site.  A search in Google will give you a list.  When I find out which I would recommend, I will share that info. I went to a couple.  One said I had 18 another said I have 330.

•  Instead of using words like “click here” (which I used to always do) use “Visit Sara’s page on refinishing furniture” .
• I setup Bing Webmaster Tools, but I know it takes a couple of days for the information to get in there.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts.

I am going to work on my blog…are you?  Did you find anything interesting or learn anything new and relevant in this post?