Race For Rank: The Series

All right, I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t necessarily agree with PageRank. Generally, it’s a large mystery and the only thing we know for sure that will work to increase PageRank are the tried and true messages sent from other bloggers and webmasters.

Yes, there are those famous backlinks but ranking in the SERP (search engine results pages) is just as important. And here’s where that handy dandy search engine optimization comes in to get you working to get your site ranking.

After the last PageRank update, I have to admit that I’ve been looking at the ranking of the many various sites that I visit just to see where they rank.

Imagine a bit of my annoyance that a brand new site, less than 3 months old, starting at 0 and shooting up to PageRank 4 in just one single update. Higher than where others are after 2 years of blogging.

What are they doing different to achieve better PageRank?

And here’s where this post series starts.

Race to rank will be an ongoing series of posts explaining and exploring ideas of what I’m doing to achieve better rankings for my site across the board with various different sites, not just PageRank.

PageRank

To achieve better PageRank I’ll be working on gaining backlinks, connecting with other bloggers, and networking with those in my niche. To do this I’ll be finding blogs that are useful to me and the topics that I largely blog about.

Additionally, I’ll be working on improving what I’m doing for SEO to rank better in the SERPs.

PageRank Goal: Next update, index goes to 6.
Currently: Index page is at 5.

Technorati

With Technorati it seems that I need to rank better by having more “blog reactions” which is simply having a blogger link to you in a post.

To accomplish blog reactions I need to focus on “linkbait” articles and generate buzz that others want to talk about and others want to link to. This will help with both Technorati blog reactions and PageRank’s backlinks (providing they are followed links but I’m OK with either follow tag used).

Technorati Goal: Reach Authority 250 by February 2009.
Currently: Authority 70

Alexa

This may be the hardest thing for me to accomplish alone. Because Alexa’s rank is based on those who use the Alexa toolbar, it’ll be hard to measure how I can accomplish this.

However, because webmasters generally understand the importance of Alexa rank, most of them search using Alexa. Because of this, I may have a larger audience using Alexa than I actually know.

At one time, it had been believed that you couldn’t use Alexa with Firefox. But with the new addition of the sparky add-on, Firefox users can be counted in Alexa traffic. Installing this very add-on for my blog has already proved to be invaluable for my own rank.

Alexa Goal: Reach below 80,000 by February 2009.
Currently: 166,686

There you have it.

Because I am completely sure that I have a lot more to learn about better rankings across the board, I’ll be researching and reading what others have to say on ranking better with all three of these sites.

What I come up with, learn about, and find working for me I’ll share and report my process.

If you have any tips, tricks, or tried and true knowledge of how to rank better with any of these sites: please share! Your input and advice is very welcome.