5 ways to increase your blog rankings

Everybody, me included, wants to increase their blog ranking from RSS readers, search engine results, traffic rank, page rank etc…

So just how do you do it? Some of you may know this already some of you may not. I will share with you 5 ways that have helped me increase my blog ranking a little bit more than it used to be.

1. RSS - While customizing your blog template have your RSS subscriber buttons right at the very top. If you want sign up with a RSS tracker like feedburner, feedblitz or feedzilla to track how many readers you have and you can even show them on your blog which encourages other people to sign up.

2. Commenting - Comment on other blogs that you visit in your area of interest. Don’t just go spamming yourself across every blog out there. I’ve deleted comments on my blog that people leave just for a link to their site in the hope of getting a click. Write comments that the blog owners will themselves like and appreciate, when others read it they might click through to your blog and even become an RSS subscriber or like something you wrote and link back to you (+ for linkbacks and eventually SEO and PR)

3. Write about people/things - If there are any new web services or apps/blogs/sites that you have reviewed let the owner of the website know so they can include it in their press section of their website with a link back to you. Most new websites have this feature and it’s a great way to get free linkbacks and if it’s a popular service you might even get quite a few hits from it. (if they have a rel=”nofollow” policy don’t bother, but write anyway people like to read)

4. Page Rank - If you’re setting up a new blog then there are high chances that your first pagerank will come within 2 - 3 months and it will most probably end up being from 1 - 3. There are very few that get a 4 - 5 in their first shot itself.

But now you can tag, bookmark, digg, socialize, contribute to wikis, spread your blog widgets etc…etc… about your blog among the literally hundreds of social community sites out there to get more linkbacks to your site and potential new visitors. Forums and wikis allow you to leave a link behind, although most of them are applying a rel=”nofollow” attribute - wikipedia being the most popular to do that recently.

5. Traffic Ranking - If you are looking to attract advertisers to your blog then they will no doubt look into Alexa, Comscore and now even Compete traffic rankings. Sadly most of them only track either U.S based traffic or statistics gathered through toolbars. Which is really quite stupid as I’ve lived on three continents and still bought online no matter where I was, most web stores have international shipping you know. Plus Firefox which has a 31% share of the browser market as of writing doesn’t have any toolbar that gathers web surfing information for 3rd party services like Alexa (and I don’t want it either!).

You will notice the top sites are Yahoo and Google which offer CPC advertising, among other CPC advertising services. So set a marketing budget for yourself every month say like $20 - $40 if you plan on making a few hundred, and more if you want to make a few thousand then advertise yourself via CPC programs.

You will see a lot of very popular blogs that also use CPC advertising even though they don’t need it, why? To get more traffic and also potentially more advertisers.

So how does this affect your traffic ranking. Well if people like Yahoo and Google are at the top of the charts and they send traffic to you from their search results you also get a part of the statistics that keep them at the top of the charts. You gotta lose something to gain something.

Currently I spend around $20 - $40 to increase my exposure in the traffic rankings while making a few hundred per month, hopefully I’ll be spending more to make a thousand (to start with) per month.