Google PageRank Explained

PageRank - an exclusive technology developed by Google which can have a major impact on the success of your website. This article will attempt to explain the concept of PageRank and how your ranking can be improved without spending any money at all.

How is PageRank beneficial?
Google refers to the technology as a way of evaluating the usefulness, importance, and quality of a website. The PR of a webpage can mean different things for different people.

For a webmaster, a high PR is a sign of accomplishment. It shows that your website is moving in the right direction and has the potential to become successful. PageRank also directly effects your Google search engine listings. Acquiring a higher PR than your competition could mean more traffic for you, and less traffic for your competitors.

Visitors to your website probably won't care about the page's rank (most surfers have no idea what PageRank is). However, visitors who understand PageRank may use your PR as a sign of how credible your content is. Would you rather use the information from a website with 0 PR or a website with 5 PR and hundreds of other websites linking to it?

How is PageRank determined?
PageRank is basically determined by backlinks. A backlink is when another page links to your page. For every page that links to you, that page is "voting" for you. The more votes you get, the better your PageRank will be.

However, it gets more complicated than that because some votes weigh more heavily than others. The weight of the vote is determined by the PageRank of the page linking to you. This means that a couple links from pages with high PR could be more beneficial than hundreds of links from pages with low PR. But it gets even more complicated - each page can only transfer so much PageRank. The set amount of PR that the page can transfer must be split up between each "vote" that the page gives out. This means that a PR 7 page could actually give out as much weight per vote as a PR 3 page if it had too many outgoing links.

How can I improve my PageRank?
There are many different methods to obtain quality backlinks to your website. You will find that some methods work better than others depending on the subject and popularity of your site.

Directories
Submitting your website to directories is one of the best ways to increase your PageRank and even get some traffic at the same time. But submitting your site to just a few directories won't be good enough. You need to sit down and spend the necessary time to submit your site to a large amount of directories. This may seem like a painstakingly long process, but you'll be glad you did it when you notice results. I have taken the time to make a large list of free directories with high PageRank which you visit here. Although directories with low PR may seem like a waste of time, you should submit your site to them too because it still helps and they could eventually become a high PR site which charges money to submit to.

Link Exchanges
A very common practice to improve your PageRank is a link exchange. This is simply where two people link to the other person's website. It's best that you only link exchange with someone who has at least as much PR as you and the subject of the two websites are similar. If you receive a link from a website with a subject which has nothing to do with yours, you'll find that very little if any PR will actually be transferred to you.

Forum Signatures
If you are an active user on a forum or message board, it would be wise to put a link to your website in your signature. This could help improve your PageRank if the forum has a high PR, it could help improve your traffic from the forum members seeing your signature, and your site could get spidered more often because it is linking to a forum (forums generally have a lot of new content every day and search engines love new content).

Buy Advertising
Although it isn't the best of choices, many webmasters will buy text link ads on websites with high PR. Although this can be effective, it can be very expensive and only a temporary thing. If you purchase text links for just a couple months, after the months are over you won't have the backlinks which were giving you the "votes" you needed to keep your PageRank. So you have now spent a large amount of money on text links, but in the end you're right back where you started.

Articles
This is a method which not many people know about. Basically, you write articles about the subjects you know a lot about. You then let other people use these articles as long as they provide a link back to your site. If you wrote a quality article, you'll find many websites will want to use it, thus giving you plenty of backlinks. This method can work well with anything which you develope and give away for free such as scripts, web design, etc.

Stay On Google's Good Side
The most important thing to remember when trying to increase your PageRank is to not cheat and to always follow the rules. The people which run Google aren't fools and they have many ways of catching cheaters. Don't even think about using any of the "link farms" or trying to hide keywords on your pages. If caught, you may not get unbanned for many months.

Make A Quality Website
If you have a quality website which your visitors enjoy going to, then you will receive backlinks without having to do anything. Websites will link to you with the intention of informing people of a helpful resource, or showing off a cool new website they found, or any other reason other than trying to increase your PageRank. If you build it, backlinks will come...

This article is from PRchecker.net
Instantly check the Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, indexed pages, and backlinks of any web page! Also has detailed articles on webmaster issues such as improving PageRank.

---

Top 10 Little Used SEO Strategies

There are millions of web sites trying to get listed... Read More

Search Engine Marketing 101: What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Web Site

If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered... Read More

Is Page Not Found Making Google Tell The World Site Not Found?

Search Engines are hard to tame, that's for sure. But... Read More

Optimizing For Visitors Not Search Engines

Most people feel that optimizing is to target the search... Read More

Why Top Search Engine Placements Never Move?

#1 question when it comes to web advertising is how... Read More

Complete Web-Site Optimization For Search Engines (Part 1)

SEO or search engine optimization strategy now becomes widely popular... Read More

Should You Be Linking for Traffic or Rankings?

Just for a change, rather than a technical article, I... Read More

Developing A List Of Keywords For Marketing

Keywords aren't just some words that allow search engines, like... Read More

Search Engine Saturation Tool ? A Must Have SEO Tool

Search Engines have become the soul of the Internet. They... Read More

New Free Online Tool for Keyword Research

I came across a new website the other day and... Read More

Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks

Use text links, avoid image links. Anyhow, if you... Read More

Playing By Googles Rules

As the undisputable leader in search engines, Google places a... Read More

Googlebot Wont Go Home

I have 'Googlebot' crawl my site every day like a... Read More

The Latest Craze: Local Search, 7 Steps to Being #1 in Your Local Market

Anyone would agree that it is much easier to be... Read More

The Disease of Google Banning: Are You At Risk?

Definition:Google banning occurs when Google removes your site from its... Read More

What Is Waiting for Us? Tomorrows SEO Industry

Today, SEO is swiftly approaching saturation point. More and more... Read More

How to Get Non-stop Free Traffic to Your Website

Yet the simple truth is that without traffic a website... Read More

Keyword Selection- The Dark Horse of Search Engines Optimization

Below are what I call the "10 Commandments" for Keywords.To... Read More

How to Improve Your Search Engine Positioning and Increase Traffic Today

Every website has times when traffic is higher than others.... Read More

10 Quick Ways To Kick-Start Your Profit Pulling Keywords

First, you must realize that targeting the right keywords or... Read More

4 Tricks For Lightning Fast Indexing

The biggest problem that most are running into seems to... Read More

Link Building Services

In today scenario when we talk about Search Engine Optimization,... Read More

How to Choose Keywords to Theme Your Pages and Boost Your Traffic

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is... Read More

Drive More Traffic to Your Website With Your Web Page Title!

One of the most overlooked, but important components, on your... Read More

The Real Search Engine Optimization Guide

Nowadays, there is so much talk about SEO (search engine... Read More

Googles Next Big Move

November 2003 might go down in history as the month... Read More

The Google Sandbox ? A Frustrating Inevitability or a Golden Opportunity?

IntroductionThe Google Sandbox is a term applied to the phenomenon... Read More

Why Optimize Your Site For Search Engines?

Sometimes a search engine optimization company will miss that glaring... Read More

10 Easy Steps to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings!

In order that someone finds your website and buys your... Read More

SEO Expert Guide - Sitewide Optimization (part 4/10)

In parts 1 and 2 you learnt how to develop... Read More

Not Ranking High Enough on Search Engines? Here?s Some Help!

Search engines are frugal things. (Froogle, too, haha! Sorry, lame... Read More

Learn about the Google Search Engine Tools

Think you know everything about searching with Google? Think again.... Read More

What are the Benefits Of Submitting To Directories?

Increasing your web traffic and rank in search engines is... Read More