As of the recent PageRank update on August 2, my blog has been around for 79 days. Previously, I had been a PR0, but due to this update, my blog has become a PR2. I would like to tell you what I did right, and what you can copy from my success. As we all know, the key to building a decent PR quickly in a short amount of time lies in top notch content and lots of backlinks. Here are some tips I would like to share with you.
Top quality content that ranks very, very well in the SERPs, and also appeals to readers.
When writing content, bloggers are worried about mostly two things. 1)Does my content appeal to my loyal readers? 2) Will my content receive a lot of search engine traffic? I’ve devised a really decent formula to write tons of content that readers love, yet receive thousands of referrals from search engines a month.
What’s the most visited site on earth for content? Wikipedia of course! Encyclopedia entries are the most searched for things in the world. So I decided to write some encyclopedic entries of my own. My blog is about investing, so I wrote some posts like ‘Buy and Hold’ and ‘Support and Resistance: Technical Analysis’. These are encyclopedic terms for the world of investing. If I do some serious backlinking on these articles, they’ll rank very high for keywords that get tens of thousands of searches a month!
But writing encyclopedic entries on things related to your blog’s niche isn’t very appealing to your loyal readers. After all, they can just search for keywords like ‘buy and hold’ on Wikipedia. So I devised a way to counter this problem. At the end of every encyclopedic article, I add my own opinion. For example, for my post ‘Buy and Hold’, I added a section titled ‘Why buy and hold doesn’t work’. Now this is an opinion that my readers couldn’t get elsewhere, so they absolutely loved the post for giving such an insightful explanation plus an honest opinion on buy and hold.
What you should do: Don’t write too many encyclopedic-like posts. Write too many, and your readers will get bored. Considering the fact that encyclopedic-like keywords need a lot of backlinking to rank high in the SERPs, you won’t rank very high if you have too many keywords to rank for and not enough time to build enough backlinks. I suggest you write maybe 1 or 2 encyclopedic-like posts every month, add your own opinion into those 1-2 posts, and spend the rest of the month building backlinks towards those 1-2 posts.
Now comes the really good part. A backlink building strategy.
A problem that I once had with building backlinks is that I would soon forget how many backlinks I had built towards certain posts! So I devised a table to solve this problem.
This is a list of all the encyclopedic keywords and high traffic keywords I want to rank for. As you can see, this table allows me to keep track of my backlink building campaign. The ‘# of Top Quality Backlinks’ column refers to the number of PR3 or above backlinks I have towards my post. As you can see, this table is detailed enough to tell me a lot of things such as how many searches a month there are for my desired keyword, but not too detailed so that it will take forever to update. Feel free to copy this table for your own purposes.
I can’t stress this enough, but guest blogging is the only true way to get high quality backlinks and significantly improve your SERPs and PR. Simple as that.
So how do you get write guest posts that really improve your search engine rankings? I once wrote a post titled ‘Problems in America’. Then I went onto a really big, PR8 finance site and wrote a post titled ‘Finance Problems in America’. Then I created a backlink from that guest post to my ‘Problems in America’ post. A key part of how much Google values your backlink is how relevant your guest post is to your website’s post. Notice that my post and the guest post I wrote are very similar in nature. That is what consists of a good backlink. That one backlink made my ‘Problems in America’ post rank 12th for the keyword ‘problems in america’.
To summarize, write guest posts about things that are highly relevant to the post that you are backlinking to. And we all should know this, but a link from a high PR site is more valuable than a link from a low PR site.
Bonus!
Since I’m a huge fan of the DBT community, I’ve decided to include a little extra into this post. There’s one simple way that has netted me an extra 200 dainew daily unique visitors. It’s called…… commenting.
A lot of people have heard that commenting on other blogs is the way to generate lots of traffic for his or her own blog. So they go out and try that, fail, and start thinking that commenting doesn’t work. The truth is, it doesn’t work because they’re doing it wrong.
Instead of commenting on a ton of blogs and sites, you should focus commenting on one high traffic website. For example, I only comment on a really, really popular business news site, and those comments usually net me an extra 200 – 300 unique visitors each day. For obvious reasons, I prefer not to disclose the name of that news site. Anyways, I scour around for articles on that news site that seem to be interesting. Then, I go to the bottom of an article, and I get REALLY engaged with the other commentors. I write decent comments on that posts, and at the bottom of every comment, I include a highly relevant link to one of my blog’s post. For example, there was this post titled ‘America’s Politicians Need to Get Their Heads on Straight.’ I got really involved in the discussions on that post, and at the bottom of everyone of my comments, I included a link to my ‘Problems in America’ post. Some of you might think that I was link spamming, but in fact, I was not. The other commentors all liked my link, and the news site has never blocked me or rejected me from including a link to my highly relevant post.

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