It is no longer a secret that search engines love blogs (either on blogger.com or on WordPress.com). But when everyone had a new blog, then wouldn’t the advantages be cancelled out equally? Probably yes. Only blogs that have managed to gather up some moss...err...The authority would have a clear advantage over others. They will be on higher page rank than others.
So for comparatively new blogs, what are the chances of ranking high for freshly published stories? Do they stand a chance to compete against the existing ones?
The practical answer is yes. It is quite possible to get a first page rank on fresh stories no matter what your competition is if you follow the following steps;
1. Write stories minimum of 500 words and optimize it well.
Stories that have lot of text with optimized content do well on the SERPS (Search Engine Rank Pages), even when the stories are published minutes earlier. The possible reason is that such articles give search engines a lot to chew on and make out as to what “topic” the article is about. An average amount of text would be around 300-500 words in my opinion. However when the competition is tougher, writing even more lengthy stories with headings, titles, images and all possible on site optimization weapons do help.
2. Utilize the title space effectively. You have around 50 characters. Use that space to write the best titles that are relevant as well as attractive. Most of the times, the title relevancy to the keyword search is a huge factor in getting a top rank. So use it well.
3. If possible get some link backs from the social media. It is probably unfair to say that you need backlinks on a fresh story. It is not a necessary, however if you can manage to get a few, that would be great. And I’m not talking about the regular link back from a normal site, but some high-traffic social media sites. Don’t ever spam for backlinks please, your story has to be equally interesting, worthy enough for good traffic.
4. Check what’s already there on the SERPS. A good strategy would be to find out if the story you are going to publish has competition already on the SERPS. Try searching for possible related searches on Google. Find out the age of the post, and if the top ten results are saturated with relevant stories. If the stories around the 5-10 results are not directly targeted to the search term (possibly a content match) then you have a higher chance to win.
5. Be clever, use the headers wisely. When writing quick posts, bloggers don’t really make use of the header tags, or that’s what I see. We have a whole range of them starting with H1. A simple H1 is good, but if you use the others, it is still a lot of added weight. So use them properly and include your possible keywords in them. Again, no keyword stemming please, but use it a natural looking way.
Having said that, there is no guarantee to a first page rank and a lot depends on your blogs history and general SEO health. But a good research and proper content design will do half the job in getting there. There are many young blogs that enjoy a steady and healthy traffic from search engines, due to their consistency in posting well optimized articles. They have very few backlinks, page ranks not exceeding PR 2 and domain ages of around 1 year or so. But almost all their stories are on the front page if not Rank No.1 – which is a good achievement I’d say.
I’m sure you’d have your own tips to share here. Feel free to comment, I’m listening.
