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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Meta tag generator

Here is a free meta tag generator/builder for blogger users and non-blogger users that include facebook and twitter meta tags.

Simply input the page title, description and keywords (if you wish not to include it leave it blank) and the post URL and click the Generate Meta tags button. To include facebook and twitter meta tags, just click on the option list that you wish included.

Copy the code (that appears after the button) applicable for you and paste it on your page. It is important to copy including all leading spaces so it will align properly when you paste it on blogger template, If you are a blogger user look for the <b:include data:='blog' name='all-head-content'/> and paste the code just below it. For non-blogger users, paste the code within the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

Blog post URL:

Page Title:

You have 160 characters left.

Description:

You have 160 characters left.

Keywords:

You have 160 characters left.

Tell Robots to:
Index this page and follow the links on the page
Index this page but do not follow the links on the page
Do not index this page and follow the links on the page
Do not index this page and do not follow the links on the page

Facebook Meta tags
Include Facebook Meta title tag (og:title)
Include Facebook Meta URL tag/Canonical URL (It will use the same URL as the one supplied above) (og:URL)
Include Facebook Meta description tag (og:description)
Include the type

Select Type
blog
website
article

Include Facebook Meta image tag (og:image)

Image URL:

Include Facebook User IDs (fb:admins)

User IDs:

Twitter Meta tags
Include Twitter Meta URL tag (twitter:url)
Include Twitter Meta Title tag (twitter:title)
Include Twitter Meta Description tag (twitter:description)
Include Twitter Meta image tag (twitter:image)
Include the type

Select Twitter Card Type
summary
photo
player

For Blogger Users copy this

For others use this

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Add your profile photo in search results

Google Authorship Markup: How to add your photo into SERPs

So you wanted to add your profile photo into the results page of major search sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The short answer is by using Authorship Markup and it is called rich snippet. And in Google it is done without having to write a single code.

Why bother with Authorship Markup
Aside from the obvious that it is quite cool, it also standouts out among the other results. And if it stands out you get more attention, thus you get more advantage against the competition. It also gives the impression that that search result is more credible since Google has given you authorship on that particular subject or with the article.

Many believes that with the authorship, click through rates have increased for their site. I mean, just look at this result:

Here is what it looked without the Authorship Markup

An here is with Authorship Markup

And so how did they do it?

Here is how

• You need to have a Google+ account - If you don't have one yet or even if you don't intend on using it just create one since it will be used to link your site/content and your bio/profile. If you are on Blogger, I suggest that you take time to write your Tagline and Introduction.
• Link your profile to Google+
1. Go to your site and click your about or profile page, the one that contains your personal profile.
2. Copy the URL of that (profile) page from the address bar.
3. Go back to your Google+ profile and click on About.
4. Scroll down until you see the links box.
5. Click Edit and under Contributor to click Add custom link and on Label put something like +Your Name Blog. On URL put the copied profile address. Make sure that Current contributor is selected on the drop down menu.
6. If you don't see your site listed under Contributor to add it as well by following step 5.
• Note to Blogger users - To connect your blogs to Google+, go to your dashboard and click on Google+ then on the right side will be the Get Started button. From there, just follow the instructions or you can still manually do them by following step 5.
• Link Google+ profile to your site's content
1. Add the 'rel=author' on the link of your author box (the <a href="http://example.com/profile.html/" of written by Blog Author at the bottom of the page)
2. If you have a profile page, ad the 'rel=me' on the link.
3. For Blogger users (or even if you are not) you can link your Google+ profile directly by adding '?rel=author' at the end of the URL link like https://plus.google.com/14790572345602544?rel=author.
• Test and see the result using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool. Just type in your site URL and click on the PREVIEW button.

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Becareful of using site:http://www.yoursite.com to tell if your site was indexed

The short answer is, the command site:http://www.yoursite.com does not indicate  if your site got indexed by Google.

Too often, you see people respond to queries like "How to check if my site got indexed by Google?" with typing the above phrase in Google's search bar. That is just misleading. Because such a querry will bring up all the URLs that have been crawled by the spider but not nescessarily mean that it has been indexed already.

To support this point, let us look at the difference between the cache and index in Google's perspective. The cache contains a snapshot of what a URL looks like at the time Google spiders it. An index on the other hand is basically a database of all URLs where it gets its results when someone makes a querry (a search). Therefore, if a site is on the list, it is easier to be included in the search results. But it does not mean that all crawled URLs are indexed.

If you really wanted to know if your whole site is indexed, use the free tool provided by Google which is the Webmaster Tools.

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Page rank suffers due to redesign or change in domain

Consider this, you set-up a web page. You worked hard on it, wrote original content, worked even harder to get those very hard to get back links and after several weeks or even months of hard work, all your labor paid off and now are enjoying a very good page rank.

You continue to work hard to maintain your hard earned rankings. Meanwhile, as what normally happens, some if not all of your original work have been scraped off or copied by other "webmasters" into their site. But of course being the originator of such a content, Google through its search algorithm see this and affords you all the credit and in turn gives your site a high page rank.

Fast forward to the future, 5 years from now. You decide to redesign your site including your sites structure or you wanted to move your domain. After your new design is done or changed your domain you put it up, waited and watched while Google crawled your site

But results is not as you expedt it to be because your rankings starts to slide down and you are no longer enjoying a high page rank as you used to.

Why? Because now Google thinks your content are duplicate from your own page or from others. That is because with the new structure, Gogle creates a new index for your site and this time it thinks that those articles are newly created and seeing that such articles already exist in its index it thinks they are duplicates which we all know is not.

As a result of this you get penalized by either having those pages that are thought to be duplicates deindexed. Consequently, your page rank suffers.

There is also the matter of your inbound links becoming useless because they will all become broken and as such their link juice will not flow to your site to help boost your rankings.

It is unfair, I know, but that is how it works. Of course, you could try to appeal to Google by making a reconsideration request or inform them through some other means but you may not get as high page rank as you did prior to everything for one thing, probably all your back links will no longer be working for you.

Think about it and tell me what are your thoughts.


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Keywords and Google search

I have read not so recently on some article that keywords are not important to search engines and I was lead to believe that instead of focusing too much on keywords, it is best to focus on creating more quality articles.

But recently, I came to the realization that what I have read is false. While it is true that quality posts are important, keywords are quiete as important. This I found after making my review of the tablet I bought.

When I made that article, I wrote it keeping in mind my target keywords. No I did not reasearched it but I used the keywords I normally would use when I search it. Fortunately, those keywords seem to be the most prominent being searched because after checking my stats after several days that it was published showed it was the reason my visitors landed on this blog.

If keywords weren't important, why would Google Analytics still bother to report it? And why would they still bother to maintain the Google Keyword Tool site?

In my humble opinion, while it is true that quality and original article are important to get ranked higher in Google and other search engines, it is equally important to place important yet relevant keywords to your article. This is specially true to individual posts or pages in your site because without them, no matter how good an article is if important keywords are missed out, it will never see the light of day and no body will be ever to read it. Think of it as the beacon that will lead people to find at least your particular article.

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One way to create backlinks-Claim your blog in Technorati

As you may have read already, one of the ways to get ranked by Google is to get a link from an authority site back to your site. You do this by either commenting on blogs or guest post on other blogs. Another is by submitting your site to directoris/how to sites. These how to sites put your site to their list and by writing articles for them it will rank you by authority depending on how popular your posts are. If your authority is high enough your site will figure on the top of the list. So in a way this is similar to guest posting.

So this is what this post is about, I have just claimed this site in Technorati. Claiming is what Technorati calls when someone submits their site on the list. I am making this so it will sere as a reminder on how to claim a blog in Technorati for me and for others interested on it as well.

To start claiming, log in to Technorati. If you have no account there yet, sign up then log in. After logging in, go to the bottom of the landing page. There you will see an input field "Start a blog claim" then click claim.

After this just follow the succeding instructions and supply all the required information. Once done, you will recieve a claim token in your inbox. Use this claim token to place it on your blog just to prove that you are the owner of the site by having the authority to edit it.

That is the other reason for this post. I needed to put the claim token that I recieved which was 8Z3GHBSY586R. :-)

After publishing this post, or in your case posting your claim token in your post, go back to your technorati account page and there look for your recently claimed blog and then check claim just below the icon.

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Making a link on Blogger's Dynamic View landing page

As everyone may know by now, I love using Blogger's dynamic view for my blogs. And so this past two days I have been looking around to see what has changed since its inception. Sad to say, there is not much that changed, by that I mean design wise.

Since dynamic view was rolled out, users are restricted on using it as it is. No modifications can be done to customize it. Well at least now some gadgets can be added namely Blog Archive, Followers, Labels, Profile, Subscribe, and Link List.

These gadgets can be added through the Layout tab. If in any case you decided to add a gadget not yet allowed in dynamic views, blogger will simply ignore them.

But you know what triggered me to check what is new to dynamic views? It was simply to add a one line link to permanently appear anywhere on my landing page.

Since I am not an expert with CSS here is my work around to the problem. I simply created a static page and named it to the anchor text that I want then point this to the page that I want it to open when it is clicked. Now I have a text link on my home page that appears on the navigation bar.

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Site map for Blogger and how important is it?

I am writing this post in the hope that anyone who will read it will not suffer the same thing that I did.

Fist a little background
I went to webmaster tools (my first time) and was going through all the tools and when I got to Blocked URLs, I noticed I have a huge number under Blocked URLs. This got me a bit curious so I check my robots.txt to see if somehow there are listed URLs there but there are none. Well there should be none because I have not configured it to not crawl any of my posts/pages.

My investigation
I don't understand why I should have a big number of blocked URLs, actually by my estimate, it was my entire blog content. This should not be so because doing a search for site:http://cyberliving.blogspot.com to check if my site is being crawled and indexed shows all my pages. This only means that I have not been blocked or penalized by Google.

I as able to breathe better knowing I am not being punished by Google. But something is really wrong because webmaster tools is reporting some blocked URLs. I checked my index status and imagine my shock to find out that it is showing 0 (zero) total indexed, Blocked by robots show the same number as the Blocked URLs but Ever crawled is showing a steady increase.

I have checked my other blogs if it is showing the same problem (I thought that maybe there was an error on this tool) but my other blogs are showing a good amount of indexed page and none on the Blocked URLs.

The realization of the problem
Well now I am starting to understand things. Making some comparisons on what I did to my other sites compared to my current problem, I have come to realize that I did not make a site map.

I then went ahead and updated to update my site map and voila! all my URLs have been submitted and after a day, I can see that all my URLs have been indexed.

Before this, I have not really considered a site map to be important but after seeing what it has done for this site, I urge everyone that it is one of the first a webmaster needs to do in order for search engines to crawl your site extensively and get indexed properly.

Site Map
I tell you now my fellow blogspot users, the only site map we can use for blogger are RSS feeds. If you go search the internet on how to create and submit a site map for your blogspot site, you will only be disappointed and maybe confused. There is NO WAY you can use an XML or any other file as site map. I am stressing this point to save you the same trouble that I went through.

So RSS feed it is. There is also one good thing about using feeds as site map and that is you do not need to update your site map every time a new page is added to your site which is particularly useful when you are blogging because all you need to worry about is creating your posts and your feeds will do the job of updating your site map.

Fortunately, an RSS feed is already made for you when you create your own blog and it is powered by Atom. Its location can be found in your robots.txt file and your robots.txt file can be accessed through webmaster tools -> Health -> Blocked URLs (or you may type in the address bar http://YOURSITENAME.blogspot.com/robots.txt). In there you can already see the content of your robots.txt file. Look somthing like this:

Sitemap: http://YOURSITENAME.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

Submit your Site Map
Copy everything after the .com (blue fonts from above) then go to Webmaster Tools -> Optimization -> Site Maps -> Click ADD/TEST SITEMAP. Paste on the input box the content of your clipboard (feed location that you copied from robots.txt). You are done. After submitting a sitemap the list of submitted maps will be updated together with its status.

If you still have some doubts or question, you may post them on the comments section and so long I will try to helps as much as I can.

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Reasons why I ditched do follow commenting for SEO optimization

When you ask a lot of blogger out there what is the best way to drive traffic to your site, almost instantly what comes to their mind is blog commenting and I will tell you why.

Blog commenting, specially dofollow high PR sites, provides you with the much needed PR juice from their site flowing to your site. And the higher PR your site enjoys to search engines like Google gets you high on search results and if your PR is high enough, you could end up at the top spot. As a result, more people will be clicking on your link at the search results thereby giving you more traffic. This is the reason why many bloggers spend an equal amount of time to blog comment as they are on writing posts to their blog.

They will also tell you about guest posting which is practically the same thing as to blog comment except that instead of commenting you submit an article to a blog owner in return you will get a link back to your site, that is if your article gets accepted.

Problem I found is that most blogs are nofollow and the ones you find to be dofollow are moderated and are very strict in the sense that they don't just give you a link just because you commented once or twice. Such an act is only regarded as a spam. That is however understandable because a blog needs its regular readership to be an active site and thus only regular visitors are rewarded with with a link back to their site that is dofollow.

To check if you landed on a do follow blog site, look for the dofollow icon. Do follow blog rolls usually have this. However you can also check by right clicking on the backlink of a comment and look for the <a href="http://www.someblog.com rel="nofollow"> tag. If you see the rel="nofollow" tag then that site is a nofollow.

One more reason they don't just give out dofollow link is because that would hurt their PR as they will be sharing it with you. So you see, creating backlinks (for me) is just too much work.

There is also an on-going concession these days that backlinking does not seem to be as important as the days old with search engines' algorithm no longer as simple as before. Now, algorithms consider the niche where you posted your comments as compared to yours.

Aside from the time spent doing commenting, there is always that danger of the page you have linked going south which will consequently affect your PR as well. Please note though that I am not totally abandoning this method. When I come across a blog and find myself commenting, I will drop a link to my site.

What I do instead
I am not saying that it does not work, it still does and many can prove that it does. It's just that in my case creating authentic content coupled with proper keyword research for each of my posts works better for my search engine optimization (what is SEO?).

Creating authentic content, I guess, is self explanatory. As for keyword research, what I mean is properly researched keywords placed to my blog posts. All one has to do is use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Simply search Keyword Tool in google and click on the top result.

Search for keywords relating to your next post, check for its popularity as well as its competition and pick those that are popular but with lesser competition and those are the ones that you have to place on your content.

By doing this, I am now getting trickles of traffic coming from searches such as Google and Yahoo! Something that I have not seen when I was just doing blog commenting. May not be by the volume but at least I am going somewhere.

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