Tips to improve your ranking the Top Indonesian Blogs list.

How to Improve Your Ranking in the Top Blogs List

Canonical Url

There should be only one way to access your home page, this is very, very important and affects most of the factors that are used to rank your blog.

Decide whether you want to have ‘www.’ in the domain address or not. Preferably, if you can, redirect all requests for the “wrong” url to the “right” one. See this in action - copy paste this url into your browser’s address bar

• http://indonesiamatters.com/

watch your browser’s address bar magically add “www.” to the url - that is a server side redirect.

If you use blogspot or wordpress, or any subdomain address, it’s the same, normally we would use

• http://blogname.blogspot.com/

not

• http://www.blogname.blogspot.com/

Either way, choose one and stick to it.

The canonical url issue can affect all of the ranking factors, so get it right.

Always put a trailing slash on your root address and any directories and subdomains, so

• http://www.indonesiamatters.com/

not

• http://www.indonesiamatters.com

Page Rank

Try to get links from high PR pages, especially from PR 6 pages, or 5. PR 7+ would be great of course but it’s pretty unlikely you’ll score there. If you can manage just one good PR6 link (by ‘good’ I mean a page that has few links on it, whether internal or external), that may very well bring you up to a 5 or even 6 by itself.

How do you find out the PR? If you use Firefox install the Search Status extension, it will show you the PR of every page you visit in your status bar.

How do you get the links? Ask for them of course. Don’t be shy in shooting off an email to another webmaster. Be polite, try to say something about his site, praise it, or alert him to some error or problem on the site, don’t make it too obvious that the whole point of the email is to beg for a link.

This advice mainly applies to getting links from non-blog websites.

Backlinks

Ditto. But with Yahoo “link count” (”backlinks” in webmaster talk) it’s just a matter of volume, so we’re not thinking about Page Rank.

Blogrolls - that is where the volume is going to come from, try to get on Blogrolls that are sitewide, that is the Blogroll appears on every page of the blog, not just the home page. Even better if it’s an old, established blog with thousands of pages indexed by Yahoo - get on its blogroll and you could have thousands of new links almost overnight.

How to “get on blogrolls”? - well of course the other blogger has to like your blog, but first of all he has to know that you exist - so go find new blogs in your topic area and leave a comment on some of the posts (talk about the post of course, don’t ask for a link), it’s quite likely the blogger will have a look at your site and then….

Canonical url (see above) is important here, don’t allow your links to be split between a “www.” url and a non-”www.” url. The Top Blogs list will only count the links to the url you submitted in the first place.

Technorati

Ditto again, twice, because your Technorati ranking is based on links, but this time we are thinking about levels of authority. So we go to Technorati.com and do a tag or keyword search and then sort the results by the authority score of each blog - then we’ve got some good targets to get links from. Like this - Indonesia.

RSS Subscribers

Some types of blog software, especially Blogger and Typepad, produce multiple formats for an RSS feed, like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, etc. The blogger might also use Feedburner for RSS and so then he may have about 5 different RSS feeds, all serving the same content. This is bad.

The Top Blogs list can only count the number of subscribers to one of your feed formats, the one that has the most number of subscribers - so it’s obvious, you need to get all of your subscribers onto the same feed.

For example - http://www.indonesiamatters.com/ - there is only one feed, a Feedburner one, and if you try to access the feed url that Wordpress creates, http://www.indonesiamatters.com/feed/ you get server side redirected to http://feeds.feedburner.com/IndonesiaMatters. That is what you should be doing, pick one format and redirect all requests for the other formats.

Social Bookmarks

Encourage your visitors to bookmark the site at del.icio.us, put a button or text link allowing them to do this with one click. Note that only bookmarks of your home page count. In general always encourage social bookmarking of your pages, not just to Del.icio.us.

Canonical url (see above) is also important here.

Traffic Rank

Not a whole lot you can do here, except perhaps these

• install the Search Status extension in Firefox
• add an Alexa ranking widget to your template - get one, as above.

Both of these things may help to increase your Traffic Rank, the first when you visit your own site, the second when other people visit it.