Nearly three months after it first acquired a PageRank (PR) score of three last April, this blog’s home page again improved its worldwide importance in the eyes of Google during its third quarter PR update of 2008 with an increase of additional one point, resulting a groundbreaking score of PR4. Online marketers, especially bloggers, commonly see this as a significant increase of popularity and advertising value. Now, as the owner of John Raul Dot Com blog, I would like to tell some points to help if you are still struggling on getting a good PageRank.

Quality inbound links: these are basic elements of getting a good PR. However, getting quality inbound links aren’t as easy as it sounds. Many people relatively talked on their blogs many things on how to do this and do that about SEO, but they themselves are struggling to get good PRs for their own blogs. Many have suggested to do blog and forum commenting, however carelessly they end up having their PR saturated by lack of good SEO strategy. Always remember that the Google God is always watching and his eyes are fixed on what you do. Do good SEO ethics, and your PR will be safe.

Making good quality contents isn’t just the king of all SEO strategies, they can also potentially spark great interest from your readers, from other bloggers and site owners…

Making good quality contents isn’t just the king of all SEO strategies, it can also potentially spark great interest from your readers, from other bloggers and site owners — and you might get a nice inbound link reward if you make them happy. If you do not have something of good quality to show to Google when you update your site, then you have no reason to brag at all.

Now, don’t be discouraged nor stop writing. It is just a matter of time for your site to get a good PR score. Just be consistent with the good things you do and Google will reward you. Even in SEO, every good turn deserves another. So keep it up!

The dedicated IP address I got from THC’s Speedy hosting plan has helped as well in bringing better traffic and SEO performance to this blog. If you’re planning to have one, better check their hosting packages and enjoy the blogosphere.

If you want to gain credible advices from experienced people in the web hosting industry, then there are no other good places than web hosting forums. There you can ask almost anything and get relevant answers from different people.

Even the people from hosting companies participate in forums to share their hosting experience, offer hosting solutions, and market their respective hosting plans and services.

Here is the list of the top three most useful web hosting forums that you can find on the Web. I strongly recommend that you register an account to all of them (yes, ALL) and participate with the hosting discussions. Do you know other great web hosting forums? Leave the links at the comments.

WebHosting Talk

WebHosting Talk claims to be the largest and most influential web hosting community on the Internet. Well, I don’t wonder why: try typing “web hosting forum” in Google search and it will list WebHosting Talk on the top spot. I’m certain that this website gets substantial traffic for its great visibility on the Web.

Anyway, anyone can register at WebHosting Talk. Underlining its claims, personally I agree that it is indeed the biggest forum that touches exclusively for web hosting.

WebHosting Talk provides special forums accessible only to its premium members. However, the main forums (and the most useful ones) are accessible to new, regular members. Those places are the perfect venues to gather advices relating to any web hosting topics or plans, learn from other’s experiences, and share your hosting ideas. WebHosting Talk is excellent because it has specific forums for shared hosting, dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPS), among others.

WebHosting Talk has 181,329 registered members to date. Its forum’s index page has PageRank (PR) level of 6 and ranked #2,933 at Alexa.

SitePoint Forum

I first learned about SitePoint when I completed reading a PHP/MySQL web programming e- book I downloaded from a torrent site and published by them. Because that resource was excellent, I became skeptic about the authors and I ended up on SitePoint forums.

I’ve been a SitePoint member for almost two years and until now, I still find their website very useful to me as a web developer and an Internet enthusiast. They’ve got tons of tutorials and articles, blog posts, videos, books, and other resources not exclusively about web hosting but also other aspects of the Web.

The SitePoint Forum, in particular, remains my greatest point of interest. The forum is well-moderated and carefully divided into different sections arranged in a sequential manner of Web development. If you want to participate to hosting-related threads, you can find the section under “Host Your Site” which has three subcategories: Web Hosting, Server Management, Apache Configuration, and Domain Names.

As of this writing, SitePoint has 233,501 members who actively contributed to over 500,000 threads and over three million posts. The forum’s index page has a PR of 7 and positioned at #782 at Alexa. So, if you want to advertise something or ask help about hosting, you’ll get the best advice from the experts for sure!

Digital Point Forum

Digital Point Forum is another popular online discussion board where webmasters, marketers and advertisers converge. I come to this forum to get new trends in web development and analyze a web host’s reputation by throwing some questions.
Digital Point Forum has six major forum categories that cover topics from search engines, marketing and business to web development design and web products. The web hosting topics are discussed in “Site and Server Administration” under Design and Development category.

As of today, Digital Point Forum has 137,564 members actively participating to over 600,000 threads and over six million posts. Digital Point Forum’s home page has a PR of 6 and ranked #270 at Alexa.

Paid review programs usually require a certain reputation, PageRank (PR) level of a blog and number of existing blog posts, before an applicant is accepted to the program. Rumors about Google penalizing blog sites who participate in paid reviews, which in their view is a way of building links “artificially”, also discourages new bloggers to get involved to the said program. However, doing paid reviews still and yet the biggest income source of popular bloggers like John Chow.

One of successful bloggers’ qualities is that they are very good at identifying trustworthy affiliate programs. They can easily detect which one’s reliable and a real money maker, and which one isn’t. Knowing such is important especially because everyone on the blogosphere wants to succeed. Unfortunately, it is certain that there are really chances where hard work doesn’t pay off, efforts backfire, and time is wasted. These can be minimized by following the guidelines successful bloggers follow in determining good and reliable affiliate programs.

The merchant should be legitimate and contactable.

If you feel that a certain merchant, the one who offers affiliate program, seems obscure and ambiguous, you should prevent from doing business with them. There have been many bloggers and affiliate marketers who became victims of fraud in the world of online marketing. Determine your merchant’s reputation by reading reviews, testimonials, and the success stories of their existing members. Also, ensure that they provide contact information and that they eager to listen to their affiliates’ inquiries and problems.

Commissions are substantial.

The commission of the products you want to promote must be substantial in itself. This is to ensure that the products are worth advertising for. If you are selling $3 item, then you must make a lot of sales to earn satisfactory revenue. It can be as difficult when you are trying to promote a high-ticket item – 20% to 40% commissions are already acceptable. If your blog is new, you may not worry about commissions being substantial or not.

There is a demand for the product.

How willing are you to market a product if nobody even wants to buy it? Well, that is indeed a question. There must be a sensible demand for the merchant’s products towards online consumer market. If you already have a blog site, your sponsored ads must match to your site’s theme or topic. Doing such will help you build credibility to your suggestions and product recommendations. Doing a keyword such on Google or Overture.com will help you determine a product’s online market demand.

Commissions are traceable in real-time.

If your friend purchases a certain product by clicking the affiliate button on your blog, the commissions earned should immediately reflect to the affiliate tracking software. Merchants running vague tracking software are a minus to the reliability of their affiliate program.

Promote relevant products.

If you are building a niche blog, it’s pointless if you join affiliate programs that aim to sell products irrelevant to your website’s topics (unless you can personally vouch that there is a high interest of the merchant’s products). However, I still highly suggest that you only promote appropriate products as this may translate to better conversion rates.

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

Provide quality content at higher frequency

This is easier said than done. Providing fresh, quality content at higher frequency remains the most effective method of SEO. Quality content refers to the significance of information or services presented on your website. For instance, if you’ve published an article (or any content) that interests your users, chances are great that they might visit it again, promote it or create link to your website.

Search engines nowadays are getting smarter and more sophisticated that it can nearly bring visitors exactly to the page they really want. Search engines will look less on the syntactic composition of a web page, and focus more on the real, actual content. Since this is the trend, it’s wise to strive to provide quality content. The content, for me, remains the “king” when it comes to website marketing.

Make your pages searchable

Validate your pages and make sure they adhere to W3C coding standards. Having a good code in your pages basically will help spiders crawl and search relevant information on the page. Spiders are automated programs or scripts that search engine use to browse and discover the pages of Web. While validating your code does NOT improve your SERP ranking, it does contribute to an effective SEO by its nature. Use absolute links, and try to avoid making a Flash-dominated page because, as of this writing, it performs poorly in improving SEO. Dead links and HTML/JavaScript/CSS syntax errors should also be eradicated so that the page will properly be indexed.

Join the social community bandwagon

If you ever heard of social community and bookmarking sites (e.g. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Del.icio.us, among others), they are hot these days because they promote socialization beyond borders. Fortunately, webmasters can take advantage of them because they can be great tools to improve the exposure of a website. Most sites work by submitting to them your content through Web feed formats (like RSS), online bookmarking and personal submission, which they publicize. Squidoo, for instance, lets you create blurbs to promote or sell just anything. If interested online readers found them, they can potentially bring huge traffic to your blog or website. To participate, visit social community websites and create an account to them.

Install SEO-friendly WordPress themes and plugins

Personally, the Themes and Plugin feature are among the myriad things I love in WordPress blog platform. They are easy to install and you don’t need to be a geek to be able to add widgets and extended functionality (well, it helps when you know HTML, CSS and PHP – but don’t be scared if you don’t). If you own a WordPress-powered blog, visit their official website and browse for SEO-friendly plugins and themes. You may personalize them if you want.
This website, powered by WordPress, uses the following plugins:

• Adsense Deluxe
  Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higher. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu.
• All in One SEO Pack
  Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Digg This
  Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referrer.
• DoFollow
  Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
  Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Google Search Widget
  Adds a sidebar widget to let users search your site with Google.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.
• Social Bookmarks
  Adds a list of xHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites.
• Text Link Ads
  Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use
• WordPress Database Backup
  On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• WP-Cache
  Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.
• WP-Print
  Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP 2.3 Related Posts
  Generate a related posts list via tags of WordPress 2.3
• WP YouTube
  WP YouTube makes it easier for you to post embed YouTube videos in WordPress. It also features YouTube options , for you to control all the YouTube videos at the same time.

I’d like to give credit to the creators of the above-mentioned plugins. It is up to you to discover how they work and what benefits they bring. Also, please note that there are other plugins that you may want to install for your WordPress site. My personal advice, however, is not to install too many plugins because they may consume too much CPU resource if you are on a basic hosting.

Spread your links to the world

In SEO, it is generally better if you strive to have more inbound links. Inbound links are links pointing to your website from other sites. If you are blog is new, it is wise to submit your website’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to free web directories. This can initially build inbound links that can be beneficial. Your next option is to exchange links with other bloggers or sites. Making friends online, blog commenting and link baiting usually help. If more of your inbound links come from sites with high PageRank and belongs to your blog’s niche, you might increase your blog’s PR as bonus. There are still quite a number of methods to spread your links to the Web, I leave it to you to discover. Enjoy!

Last year and until now, Google actively wipes out the PageRank (PR) of many blogs and websites they believed to have involved to link farms and other schemes designed to “artificially” inflate PageRank. PageRank is Google’s view on how important a web page is, thus favoring more important pages in their top Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Many observations reveal in totality that most penalized sites are those who joined networks offering paid reviews or links. For bloggers, PageRank is significant because many ad network companies (major source of blog revenues), begin to follow Google’s standards. Higher PRs somehow contribute to the continuous existence of most blog sites in the Internet.

This year, most bloggers started with a different perspective. They begin to take advantage and favor services believed to be “top Google alternatives” which, in their view, are less obtrusive to their ideals, more flexible, and more lucrative. It indicates a healthy competition and preludes another possibly more intense search engine and online advertising war this year.

My Personal Standpoint

In my personal standpoint, though I know I am quite a fan of Google services, I share sentiment with other bloggers that Google’s dominance could be an imminent but indirect threat; they impose policies and indirect guidelines associated with the usage of their services, or in relation thereof, that rather inhibit bloggers to be able to benefit from the Web as much as before. Google is giving free services to the masses but isn’t it their strategy to bait our hearts toward their products? This is debatable and I know there are many positive and negative points of view for this. However, for many bloggers, they view that the moves of Google imply that it tries to become the “Microsoft of the Web.” Well, in fact, I suspect one day Google and Microsoft will come to a head-to-head bout in creating their own standards with all people under them. Fortunately, we got alternatives to Google and they are fighting for themselves and for us.

I believe that Google will continue to be in the top ranks in 2008. There are many factors supporting this assumption. One of these, for instance, is Google’s reaction (and to least extent, Yahoo and Microsoft) with the depreciation of the US dollar. Google has safety nets that would ease hurt from the dollar crunch as other US-based companies are feeling. In the second quarter of 2007, Google’s financial report reflected that 48% percent of their income comes outside of the United States. Another point is Google’s acquisition of companies in 2007. If they are able to prove in 2008 that they did a wise move, these innovating companies under their control will push their business further.

In conclusion, like what bloggers predicted, Google might reach its plateau in 2008. Unless they make a good turnaround, its downfall will begin at least to most bloggers’ hearts. This should never be underestimated: bloggers are very influential people and they can badly damage a company’s reputation if they move together towards a similar direction.