If you blog regularly about topics of interest, you already provide frequent and unique content that can raise your blog’s Google rank. You can also bring your blog closer to the top of Google’s search results by increasing your PageRank, Google’s internal rating system. You can achieve this by adding backlinks from highly ranked websites and by coding your blog so that it is search engine-friendly
Step 1: Raise PageRank
Encourage owners of websites with a high Google PageRank to link to your site. While you cannot make site owners link you, you can contact them to direct them to the existence of your site or ask for link exchanges. If you create quality content, other site owners may link to you simply because they like your blog. Submitting your URL to website directories with a high Google PageRank and even leaving comments with your URL –if the website allows robots from Google to follow those links to your blog –can gain you links that help to raise your Google PageRank.
Step 2: Update Website Structure
Create your website with hierarchical structure, and link to every page on your site from at least one other page. In addition to this, create a sitemap on your website to both promote linking to your pages and aiding your visitors to find the content they’re searching for. A sitemap is a visual representation of the hierarchy with a link to every page on your blog. You can manually add all the links to lists or consider a plug-in such as Google XML Sitemaps for WordPress blogs to automatically create the sitemap.
Step 3: Register for Google Webmaster Tools
Register for a Google account and submit your website to Google on their “Crawl URL” from within Google’s Webmaster Tools site. After registering your website, you can click the URL from within your dashboard and click “Submit a Sitemap” from the blog dashboard. Enter the URL to your sitemap to provide Google with a listing of all pages on your blog.
Step 4: Review Image Usage
Provide text, instead of images, to display heading and important information when possible. While people can read images, search engines cannot. Use the “alt” attribute to add Google-friendly descriptions to any images. You can also use the “title” attribute to add accurate descriptions to images or links.
Step 4: Insert Metadata
Add a list of approximately ten keywords or phrases to your blog with metadata–tags which you can add in the “head” section of your blog’s source code. Furthermore, consider the phrases that visitors would use to find your website from Google and try to use those phrases in your blog posts.
Step 5: Avoid These Practices
Avoid sneaky practices that Google frowns upon. For example, do not steal content or create multiple websites with duplicate content, use hidden text, code your blog so that search engines see different content than actual users or load pages with irrelevant keywords. Google can choose to demote your website in its listings or not show it at all if you do this.
Conclusion After raising your PageRank and adjusting the structure and coding of your blog – if necessary – to Google’s standards, your blog may appear closer to the top of Google’s results. However, your blog will always compete with other relevant websites that may be more highly-ranked by the search engine.
