One of the most talked about phrases with regards to websites is ‘PageRank’. PageRank is Google’s little green score between 0 and 10, showing how important or powerful a website really is.
Now before we go on we should explain that PageRank isn’t important. It’s not the size of your PageRank that is important, it’s what you do with it (kinda catchy that!). How green your bar is has little reflection on your website’s rankings within search engines, yet so many people are still obsessed by it. They want a bigger PageRank, certainly bigger than their competitors’ PR.
You should also realise that there is a difference between your Toolbar PR and your REAL PageRank. The PageRank shown in the Toolbar is just a snapshot in time of what your PageRank was. Google updates this very rarely, sometimes just a few times per year, so don’t expect to see your Toolbar PR increase overnight – it will take months (unless of Google updates it tomorrow, depends when you’re reading this really).
So, how do you increase your PageRank? Here are some tips to do just that.
- Links – PageRank is all about links to your website, and pages on your website. The more links you have, the better. These links should be high quality, from websites with an equally high PageRank.In fact, 1 link from a PR6 website could be enough to give you an instant PR5. Does this show how meaningless PageRank really is? You still want to increase it though don’t you? OK, read on…
- Internal link structure – how your website is set up will impact on the PageRank of your homepage. Every page of your website needs to link back to your homepage in order to channel PR back. Some websites don’t link back to the homepage; this is madness – not just from a PR growing exercise, but from a usability one too.
- Reduce outbound links – Remember that every link from every page, whether going to internal pages of your own website or to other websites, leaks link juice, PageRank. Limit your links from every page of your website. The more links, the more diluted your links become.Google has also recently acted to reduce the effect of the rel=”nofollow” attribute, so adding that to external links and non important pages will still leak PageRank.
- Linkbait – the best way to increase your PageRank is through quality content. If you write excellent articles that others within your industry will want to read and link to, your website will build links naturally. The best articles will find themselves linked to from hundreds of websites, including sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon. This will increase the PageRank of your specific article page, which will in turn filter through to the homepage.
- Article Submissions – writing article submissions and submitting them to numerous article directories, with links back to your website, will increase your website’s PageRank as links are followed by Google. Be wary that some article submission websites feature no followed links, so the impact on your PageRank will not be felt by all of them.
Following these tips will help to increase your website’s PageRank, but as we’re not in the business of giving useless advice (and PageRank is fairly pointless) these tips will also help to improve your website’s overall SEO, rankings and traffic as well.
That’s the true meaning of PageRank. Increasing it should not be your goal; it is merely a by-product of a strong SEO campaign to increase your search engine rankings, your website’s traffic and ultimately your sales and leads.
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