Google Page Rank: What You Need to Know
Liane Bate
May 19, 2006
Now that you’ve got your new website up and running, it’s time to start building your Google Page Rank, or “PR”. Page rank is the value that Google gives your site, measured by how many quality links are pointing back to your site, or how popular your site is. The more links you have pointing back to your site, namely quality links from sites with a higher PR, the higher your site will be ranked in Google’s search engine. The rank is on a scale of 0-10 - ten being the highest rank of course! It takes time to get a PR higher than zero when first starting out. This is partly because once you submit your URL to Google and other search engines, it may take weeks or even months before it is indexed. It may also be partly due to the fact that you just need to build good content for your site, and have your links on other people’s websites all over the web. Even if you have a PR of 1-5, you are doing well, even though it may not sound like it. The challenge is for webmasters to increase their PR as much and as quickly as possible, but how?
First of all, there are some tools you can use to check your PR, namely the Google Page Rank Toolbar, which can be downloaded for free from the Google site, and is installed onto your browser. This allows you to check your own site’s PR, as well as those of other sites you visit, which will give you a good clue as to which sites you should be linking to. Linking to sites with a higher PR will increase your site’s PR. It’s a good idea to do a Google search for keywords related to your site’s content, and choose sites to link to whose PR you know in advance. You can send an email to that webmaster asking to exchange links. Not all of them will accept, but the few that do could increase your PR very quickly just by linking to your site!
Next, it’s important to do some serious keyword research using a keyword search tool, one of the most popular being Overture’s keyword search tool. With this tool, or other similar tools, you would type in search terms, such as “make money online”. Since this is a very broad search term, it is going to be highly competitive and will generate a high number of results for number of times that term has been searched. When optimizing your site, you want to avoid these highly competitive terms and use keywords that generate fewer results, by coming up with a keyword that is searched less, but still popular.
There are a few tricks to getting ranked higher with regards to keywords, such as changing some of your source code keywords. For example, you can change the title tag of your site to match the optimized keywords you want to use. You can also look at the source code of other people’s sites by clicking View/Source in your browser while visiting their site to see how optimized their site is and which tags and images they use or don’t use. It is helpful to highlight, bold, or italicize your website keywords to get a higher rank, especially if your competition is not doing that. If you check what your competition is doing, and do what the higher ranked sites are doing, you may be able to outrank them!
First of all, there are some tools you can use to check your PR, namely the Google Page Rank Toolbar, which can be downloaded for free from the Google site, and is installed onto your browser. This allows you to check your own site’s PR, as well as those of other sites you visit, which will give you a good clue as to which sites you should be linking to. Linking to sites with a higher PR will increase your site’s PR. It’s a good idea to do a Google search for keywords related to your site’s content, and choose sites to link to whose PR you know in advance. You can send an email to that webmaster asking to exchange links. Not all of them will accept, but the few that do could increase your PR very quickly just by linking to your site!
Next, it’s important to do some serious keyword research using a keyword search tool, one of the most popular being Overture’s keyword search tool. With this tool, or other similar tools, you would type in search terms, such as “make money online”. Since this is a very broad search term, it is going to be highly competitive and will generate a high number of results for number of times that term has been searched. When optimizing your site, you want to avoid these highly competitive terms and use keywords that generate fewer results, by coming up with a keyword that is searched less, but still popular.
There are a few tricks to getting ranked higher with regards to keywords, such as changing some of your source code keywords. For example, you can change the title tag of your site to match the optimized keywords you want to use. You can also look at the source code of other people’s sites by clicking View/Source in your browser while visiting their site to see how optimized their site is and which tags and images they use or don’t use. It is helpful to highlight, bold, or italicize your website keywords to get a higher rank, especially if your competition is not doing that. If you check what your competition is doing, and do what the higher ranked sites are doing, you may be able to outrank them!
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