How I made my blog in blogger get a page rank?

This blog's rank 

How I manage to get PR3 for this blog.
Can a freely hosted blog or site such as CyberLiving be able to get a page rank? Look no further, this blog is an example that it can. Read on and you may also learn a thing or two.

While starting with this blog, I was faced with the question whether it will be worth it to pour my efforts creating and writing content on a free hosted site like blogger because I am not sure whether it will ever going to rank at all on SERPs.

My apprehension stemmed from the fact that some ad serving companies shy away from such sites as mine (free hosted site or blog) and I have read many articles that gives advise to get a domain and pay for a host server instead of a free one if ones intent is to be able to make some income out of it since it is very difficult (they say) to get a page rank with a free hosting site.

But as a starter with very limited knowledge with blogging, much so maintaining a site and getting ranked, and no funds to use to pay for a host server and acquire a domain name, I opted to use blogger.

Site a little over a year old before getting ranked
To date (12/29/2013), this site is  approximately 1 year and 2 months old. When this site was started, I used the dynamic view template as I liked its simplicity but as I progress, I found I am being limited as to what I can do with my blog. That is when I decided to change my theme to one that is freely available to use. This was around six months from its creation.

While I was also trying to write content, I am also searching for ways on how to get some page rank. Here I will try to outline what I did that I think gave me my page rank.

Do some link building through blog commenting and guest posting they say
Almost any site will tell you that to get some PR, you need to get some link juice from other site. This means you need to do some link building. The most common that is being recommended are: do some blog commenting and guest posting.

The problem I got from blog commenting is that most of the sites with PR do not just share their link juice which is very much understandable. Many of them are moderated and the chances that a comment gets through to such sites is very slim (well at least in my case it was). Guest posting also shares the same scenario as with blog commenting. To be able to guest post, one has to establish some sort of a relationship with your target site's owner. There are those that encourage you to guest post in their site by sending your article via mail but there is a big chance also that your article which you have spent some time writing it will get rejected. But my biggest apprehension with guest posting is that why should I let others benefit for my work where the page that it was posted may not even get a PR rendering it actually not getting any link juice thereby wasting my time and my work altogether. Or it may be the other way around, being that my work could actually be a very good piece which will eventually make a very high PR then I only gave it away and let someone else benefit more from it compared to me who was the one that actually made the article.

I decided, therefore, not to focus on it and just put all efforts in writing articles. More explanation on this later.

Claimed my blog in Technoratti
I have read from somewhere that one way to get back link is by submitting your site to listing pages like Technoratti. So I did claimed my site at Technoratti. The best thing with technoratti is that it automatically picks from your article and put it up in its list without you having to do anything giving you additional exposure for practically doing nothing.

Submit my site with Google and Yahoo/Bing
I know that my site exist, my friends know that my site exists since I do tell them but, Google does not know it. Not yet. Maybe, eventually it will discover it from its daily crawling of the world wide web. But why wait when you can introduce your site to Google. You do this by submitting it and by doing so Google will get to know that such a site exists. Then I used Google Webmaster Tools to address issues. In my case, I only had issue with my site map (missing) which I only submitted my RSS feed as my sitemap (note that with Blogger, there is no way to create a real site map).

Focused on creating content
I hate to say content is king in this post as it has been said so so so many times I could vommit (seriously). Why I despise people using such phrase is because, to me, many of them come out like false prophet proclaiming the end of the world that never came. Don't get me wrong, that is very true and I do believe that content more than anything else makes or brakes a site. It is just that many uses it but never actually make a good explanation or argument for it aside from mentioning the usual list of creating original content, good quality article, giving credit where credit is due and so on.

While it is true that your content is very important, I am not so sure about the original part. Why? That is because in this day and age where almost everything has already been written on the internet, I don't think there is this thing which we can still say as original per se. With that said, I believe that original content would mean writing things, which may already exist on the web, but put into the context of what is the subject of what you are writing or  write it on how it will relate to the overall niche of your site. For me that is what original content means otherwise, the original author (the very first to write that topic) would then also be king but as we all know, that is not the case.

Going back, I stated earlier on that instead of focusing on link building and guest posting I focused instead on writing articles. My reasoning behind such action is that when I write good enough article at least someone may notice it (by accidentally stumbling upon it or it may actually come up on SERPs) and if he/she likes it may repost it on his/her own site or on social media whereby allowing more people to view it who may also again share it. My hunch did prove correct because some of my posts did captured the interest of people and made links back to their sites thereby effectively giving me some quality back links.

Made some redesign to my pages
I already did like my theme but I feel the need to create static pages to my site so I could categorize my posts and make better about pages. On these pages I have also made my code to give it the look that it is today and make my classification to may posts.

Create internal links
From my readings, I also came across a theoretical article that with internal linking alone one could generate PR for a site if there is enough pages to link. Without getting into the details of the article, I then decided that I should link all my pages to pass in the link juice throughout my site.

Rich Snippets
Going through the SERPs, I have noticed some results are displayed better than others. Others have the photo of the author and the description is actually much more intelligible than others. I later learned this to be rich snippets and it is done through Authorship Markup. It is believed and others could attest that with authorship markup, the click through rate to a site increases. So I also included it into my site. Adding authorship markup to my blog now makes my site in SERP show up much more appealing as it now shows a face of a person (me) along with the result.

Adding Meta Tags
In order that I get better description to show in search results for my site's pages, I added meta tags. Together with authorship markup, it now gives my site a better chance of getting clicked when it shows up on search results.

Lastly.....

I continue to write more articles. All the things that I have outlined on this post has a dedicated post on how it was done. Feel free to navigate on this blog to look for them.


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