I am happy today.

My building blogs and small businessinitiative, socialvani.com, went from PR 2 to PR 3 this PR update from Google.

Now, I know this development might not interest those with high PR’s than this one but the undeniable fact is that blog advertisers prefer a better PR to invest those $$$. Right?

…and any blogger with even 1% sense will want to capture those $$$…

I started my blog in September 2011, received the first page rank in May, 2012 and then the current one in November page rank update.

I was definitely not happy with the progress and I decided to do something about it.

….all this used to take at least 25 hours per week.

The important thing here is that I did not research the methods I was using; I just followed what others were doing and thought that doing them will give me the same result.

I was so wrong!

What did I do?

How?

This is the first task I did from August 2012. I tried to understand the content I was posting, especially the guest posts.

I thought about whether the content was really helping to gain a certain target or was it just filling space. The second option fit more perfectly.

I stopped posting regularly.

In fact, if you see the blog, there were just 6 postings in August and September and just 2 in October; nothing in November yet.

While referral traffic from Facebook and Twitter is good; I wanted more % of organic traffic. I did 3 things to gain this –

I don’t mean to imply that All-in-One plugin is bad; it just that SEOPressor worked for me.

Within few days, I could see organic traffic increasing considerably. Organic traffic is 85% and the rest in referral traffic.

I reviewed all the guest posts published and started to redirect them to other blog posts or removed some entirely.

Thereafter, I submitted the revised sitemap to Google through Webmaster tools and re-indexed the site.

I realized that most of the guest posts were not linking to domains related to my niche. So after contacting the guest bloggers, I removed them or changed the back links to ‘no-follow’.

A lot of fellow bloggers told me that the design was not good for the blog. I heeded their advice and changed.

I am using a free theme currently and it is working for me.

While revisiting the blogs to apply SEOPressor, I did a lot of internal linking and I think it did help in this PR update.

Previously, the main focus was on optimizing the blog posts but last month, I revised and optimized the blog pages like About, Contribute and Advertisement section.

Now, I get high traffic on these pages as well.

I am happier with the work I did in the last 3 months than the work I did in the first 9 months.

Yes, what I have written above is NOT a manual for you to copy-paste on your blog.

If you do, you will make the same mistake I did in the beginning.

Use common sense.

Stop doing everything and dig into your blog/s and find out the loopholes.

Fill the loopholes & get better ranking.

Have anything to share regarding PR updates? Comment below.