Any tips for ranking a health blog?

It depends on how many links your competitors are usually receiving and also how much fresh content are they bringing on their websites, on a weekly basis. What do you mean by keyword difficulty of 35-45?

If your website is new
try to write articles that much. before writing must be keyword research first. looking for main keywords, long tail keywords.
try to make original article

It depends entirely on the keywords you are targeting. For most health keywords the first page is typically dominated by large sites such as webmd. Knocking those off number one requires a huge effort. I've never succeeded and am now concentrating in low low hanging fruit, lots of them. I have heard that google is hesitant to rank health sites that don't have a level of trust . How they determine trust us a mystery. All I can say is keep trying mate and if you are finding it difficult go for more obscure keywords with less competition

There are some really good guest post fiverr gigs for health niche. Try out some of them for rank improvement.

Guest blog.
Build list.
Buy some ads.
Pay for links (carefully)
Write some ebooks, publish them to kindle (mention your blog/optin list)
Publish yoututbe videos (tutorial style - link back to your blog)

It's not that hard with "mega niches". It's funny, I think the big competitive niches are actually easier to be in the smaller/weirder niches with such targeted audiences.

Everybody wants to be healthy -

It's new means try to build quality links, submit your site and promote it.

Some people here have recommended to cut back on social media signals saying they don't impact rankings. Whether they do or not is a matter of further discussion, but even if they don't you are better off having some social signals to your blog posts.

Your site is on page 3. What I suggest is that you vary what you have been doing. For a month or so try other things. Don't try to get links from the same web 2.0 and PR 6 blog over and over again. Those links might have helped you reach up to 3rd page, but you have to vary your strategy and your link sources. Go for other high PR blog links through guest posting. Try a few article submissions to top article directories like Ezine and SelfGrowth, forget about the rest only focus on a couple top article directories.

put up a post....with subscribe form under neath.

then go to where your most likely customers are and direct them back to your post and get them to like the post and subscribe to your list.

You do this, everyday, you could be making about $4k a month in no time. Its all about working hard, and taking action but. MOST PEOPLE Do not want to work to make money, they want everything given to them. But this is simple write content, very good content and then market that content.

Every new blogger has the same question. One most important thing that you need to do to increase traffic is to submit your blog to search engines like Google,Yahoo,Bing etc.
You need to interlink all your blog posts
Use Social media to increase Traffic. Reddit,StumbleUpon,Facebook can drive lot of traffic.

First of all, before you start trying to chase down traffic from sites, figure out what you site is about. "Health" isn't a niche... It's not even a market... It's a word.

Health (word) -> Weight Loss (market) -> Natural Weight Loss (niche) -> Natural Weight Loss For Moms (sub-niche)

Until you've got you niche and respective sub-niches mapped out, going to try to finding traffic is like dropping a 300lb piece of marble on your foot because of an ingrown toe nail (where do I come up with these analogies?) Sure, you'll break your foot and hardly notice the pain from the toe nail anymore, but you've done little to address the problem.

While it's great to get randomly interested traffic to one random topic article on your site, if you have nothing else to offer them in that same topic they won't really engage with your site and more importantly you. In other words there's no relationship being built to make that email list everyone is telling you to build really work for you.

Now, I know your question was about ranking and I'm going to get there... I just felt like we needed to fix some things first.

Forget the idea of ranking for any big keywords right now. Maybe one day, but that day isn't today. If you had years of SEO experience, sure, you could do it easily - but you don't. Instead be realistic.

Once you've defined a niche and subniches, become an authority in your own little world. What do I mean by that? Answer every question that someone might ask with shorter blog posts. There's a bunch of keyword tools out there that will dig up this questions for you - or research them on answers.yahoo.com

Yukon has 2 threads about how to do that with seoquake, but it's late, I'm lazy and on an Ipad so dig them you yourself sugartits

Anyways - I'm not talking about becoming an authority site (although that may happen) - I'm talking about being the go-to guy with the answers in whatever little subniches you operate in. It doesn't have to be Pulitzer material and it shouldn't be. If anything, write like you're the guy next door that has cookouts every weekend, eats hot dogs, drinks cheap beer and smokes a cigar while cutting the grass. Be a person, a dude if you will... Be approachable...

Once you have all of that material up, which shouldn't take long - a few weeks at most - THEN start to reach out to people, forums, blogs, reddit, etc. Now, instead of delivering some random article you are delivering the same article and an entire site worth of detailed information on that niche. The impression you want to create is that you are really an authority on the topic. You know it, you love it, you sleep with it at night and smack its ass in the morning...

It's much less cheesy and much more workable because now when you approach other bloggers about talking about something on their blog (a guest post) they can look at your site and quickly know that you've got a background in this and aren't just some SEO (even though you might be.)

And finally, after all of that you can start talking about ranking your "health" site.

...Or just build a link network... Whatever... I'm done typing.

PS - went back over this, saw you were new... Don't mind me, I'm an acquired taste. A bit salty.