How I got PR6 (and pretty nice SERPS) without understanding anything about SEO

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When I first hit PR6 I didn't even know what SEO (or SERP) meant... man, I'm not sure if I even knew what PR meant! Part of this article contains totally newbie stuff. But it was something I didn't have a clue years ago, so I thought to share. Perhaps somebody will benefit from this:

Anyway - here's what SEO/SERPs stuff I did

I didn't purchase a single SEO book (although considered buying Aaron Well's SEO book simply because I heard many people recommending it) and was merely lucky to have configured my wordpress blog properly (for example, instead of "myblog.com/?id=5" I had posts that had urls such as "myblog.com/how-to-write-posts/").

I found out that TITLE tag is very important, so I immediately paid attention to it. For perhaps 99.3% SEO people this is "obvious truth" but it certainly wasn't for me - I just was lucky So basically, TITLE tag is important to have because search engines show that in the search results. (at least part of it if it's very long)

I also realized that META tag "description" is also very important - it's shown right below the title when you do google search for example. I made sure to write something sensible there.

Last but not least I started putting better keywords in blog post titles and link anchors (link achors is basically the "text that people click" in the link) - those are also helpful for getting higher in relevant searches.

Wordpress platform worked well for me, and by merely doing these 4 really simple things I greatly improved my site in the search engines. Title tags for example was a big deal when people search different articles.

Okay, enough basics - now the 'juicy' PR6 part
So how did I got the PR6? (without paying a single dollar on ads). Well... the first obvious answer is: natural links. I simply was writing content daily that was picked by people - and miracles started to happen. People linked to my articles and search engines like that. No magic, no SEO tricks... just simply writing stuff people like to read and link to. That's it. I suppose "valuable unique content" goes a long way.

Tip: One good example article is something like "What are your TOP 10 moviews (or drinks/games/colors/whatnot)?" - then writing an article where you list your own TOP10 movies. Then simply ask people to write their TOP 10 moviews in their blogs (and perhaps "link to your site"). People like that and will link back to you.

Then I interviewed professionals (from major gaming companies) and they got featured in my blog (thus adding to my site credibility). As I had interviewed "famous" people is was then easier to exchange links with relevant high profile sites that had high PR (although I didn't even know about their high PR at that time). I did this for some time (don't do that anymore) and it helped for PR purposes.

Last but not least my site got featured on high profile websites when I sent press releases or announced something witty (like interviews or contest). These websites linked to my site thus helping me to get precious backlinks - helping me to gain better pagerank.

That's about it. I still don't understand pretty much anything about this SEO stuff , but by simple checking out some basic tips I was fortunate enough to get my site recognized in the search engines pretty well.