Damien Riley

When I first started blogging in December of 2006 at Postcards from the Funny Farm, I had no idea how to increase rank or even sign up for many blogging protocol sites like Technorati and Google Webmaster Tools.  Through time I have learned a lot of exciting information about how to get my words out to a larger audience through rank and marketing.  Every little thing you learn helps.  Most people who read this blog are probably fairly seasoned bloggers and I apologize if this is covering well known ground but I wanted to post it anyway for posterity’s sake.

Did you know that all ranks out there use “incoming links” as a major criteria for your blog’s score?  Google and Technorati are no exception.  I suggest to anyone I help that they should work on getting incoming links first and foremost.  Trafic is important but not as important as most newbies seem to think.  Ironically enough, you can get the traffic later through social media and the incoming links will only enhance it at that point.  People still seem to think traffic is more controllable than incoming links or “backlinks” but it is not.

What I do is make a “to-do” list of ways to get backlinks and then to do it like a checklist.  These items include but are not limited to:

• Writing guest blogs for friends (excellent source of traffic as well)

• Commenting on blogs that ping their comments (simply look up your backlinks and see what comments show up.  If they are there … they ping!)

• Blog Carnivals (These are great because you just browse for the ones you like and submit … no need to write new content!)

• If you own other domains, such as mine on teaching and another on psychology, reference your blog from those once in a while. (hint, I just did it :)

These are just a few ideas.  get into a schedule of following them and your rank will grow quite quickly (ie; in a matter of months) I hope this helps someone out there.  If you have some other feedback, I’d love to hear it.