Staska.Net

Ranking for important keywords in search engines is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your blog. And ranking for many of them, that are not too competitive, is not as hard as you think. It’s even easier then I thought.

I was just checking my rankings in Google for some phrases and was really surprised. I am in the top spot (No.1) in Google for “Chitika RPU” and “double blog income” (at least from where I’m checking it).

And I’m on the first page (No.9) for “Chitika“.

Granted, “Chitika RPU” is not a popular term yet, but “Chitika” brings over 2M results in Google and “double blog income” brings over 1 million.

So how did I get there with my brand new blog that should be sitting in “Google sandbox” and ranking for nothing at all?

Well, my article on Best Wordpress Plugins probably did help. It has brought tons of traffic and created more then a hundred backlinks, many of them from highly respected sites. But it is not the post that is ranking for Chitika.

What I think happened, was title tags and internal linking, done the right way. As you can see in my title tags:

First, I have blog post title and then my blog name in there. And I use the keywords I want to rank for in my post headlines.

Sometimes I have to sacrifice some flashy title, but when Googlebot comes sniffing and tries to figure out what the page is about, I tell him right from the start “This is a post about “How to double blog income with Chitika RPU“.

The other thing I did was to link to Chitika RPU post, with the right keywords in anchor text, from other blog posts I make here. Including plugins list post.

That’s it. These two simple steps were enough to get my brand new blog on the first page of Google for some not very competitive, but still interesting and useful terms, in a week.

Right now they are not generating many new visitors here. But they get a few.

If you do this consistently over a few months, with most of your posts, you create a tightly interlinked web of pages with good and varied (natural) anchor text pointing at them. After a while these long tail keywords are starting to add up into significant traffic source.

So whenever you get a chance, link to some other article in your blog. Do not force it too much, but if you can make a relevant link, do not forget to do it. If you decide you really want to rank for something, go edit your old posts with good backlinks and try to include relevant link with good anchor text. Link naturally and do not fixate on a single phrase. Use synonyms, variations, partial phrases, etc;

And get your title tags in order! If the only thing that shows up in them is your blog name, you are wasting precious resource. If you don’t know how, use Optimal title plugin or read this post by Chris Garret.

If you do just these two steps right, you may be surprised by the results in a very short time.

Have a question? Think I’m dead wrong about this? Tell me about it in the comments.