There is no doubt about it. If you have pages on the web that you want visitors to go to then Google Page Rank matters to you. Google has a lot of power and as one of the leading search engines their opinion matters to web designers, site owners, bloggers, and writers all over the Internet. There are a lot of methods for increasing your Google Page Rank, and many claims for ways to do it for lots of money, but understanding how Google Page Rank works and building your site and traffic often does it well.
What is Google Page Rank?
Google rates all the pages it comes in contact with (or its bots come in contact with). To do this it runs your site and its statistics through a complicated algorithm and places it in a page rank from 0 to 10. 10 is the top of the scale and sites such as Google and Yahoo have a page rank of 10 where other sites rank lower. Sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube have 9’s and Hubpages itself rests at a 6.
While Google doesn’t tell anyone exactly how their rating came about, there are some things that we know. The more traffic you have, the more likely you will be to have a high page rank. This can be shown with sites such as YouTube, which has a ton of traffic. The second factor that is really important is links. The more links there are to your page, the higher it will be on page rank (although this isn’t quite that simple since Google will decided on how valuable your links are).
Content
There are a lot of things that need to be considered when you are working hard to increase your Google Page Rank. The first is that your content matters. Sure the Google bot doesn’t care if your gramar is perfect, whether or not you spelled a word here or there wrong, or if you write an article that is 500 words or 5000 words. But there are a lot of things to keep in mind.
SEO. There is a ton of talk these days about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This is because the Google bot does care about your key words, how often they appear, and what they are. While many claim that writing great SEO articles is all it takes, there are still more things to consider.
Writing Content for People. Sure you want bots to find you, you want them to index you, and mark your keywords. But you also want people to enjoy reading what you write. This is why it matters whether or not you have good grammar or work hard to catch typos and spelling errors.
Writing Content that Others Want to Link to. Traffic is important and because it is important you want to write high quality pages that are worth linking to. You want others to send traffic your way.
Content is the first step in the Google Page Rank process. Your site will do best if you have lots of good content on it. That’s why Hubpages continues to grow in page rank!
Traffic
Traffic building always starts with your content. You can’t grow your traffic without having content. However, there are a few ways to increase the traffic to the quality content that you have out there.
Talk about it. This can be with your friends, family, or even others that you meet. Many people will be interested in what you do and if you have a website or a place you put content they want to know about it.
Business cards. Yep there are lots of times that you can hand out your business card if you take the time and a little bit of money to make some up (whether you are paying a service or making your own). These can help many people remember where to go and they may find it interesting later on.
Join online clubs, message boards, and forums that are related to your topic. Don’t just spam the site (no one likes spam or the people who leave it). Instead join in, make friends, and add your link to your profile. This way you can direct people who are interested in your site to your profile without leaving a link. This makes it more user friendly.
Add links to all your profiles. Most of us have a lot of profiles out there these days. Add your links to your MySpace, Facebook, and other sites were you have a place to add your info to.
Use social bookmarking sites. You can use lots of different social bookmarking sites to easily link to special pages. This can draw in traffic and ratings to your site.
Building traffic takes time. Remember that it starts with quality pages and then goes from there. You can get lots of traffic from using your resources and working toward free advertising for your site.
Links
Links are important to building your Google Page Rank. Google will evaluate each of your links to determine quality. The higher quality the site the better. This makes it important to note that spam links aren’t going to help you much.
The first important part of link building is content (does this sound familiar?). This is because if you have high quality content others will link to your material for you and do some of your work. There are also some good link building ideas in the traffic building section. Here are a few more to keep in mind.
Link different pages together as long as they go together. This is really important if you write on more then one site. Add links that might be of interest to your readers.
Trade links. Often other small website owners will trade links with you. To do this, choose sites that your readers might be interested in. Make sure you consider your readers. After all, if you have a blog about power tools, you aren’t going to want to trade links with my blog on beadwork and jewelry making. Most likely readers from my blog aren’t going to be interested in power tools and your readers aren’t going to be interested in beadwork.
Add links to the bottom of your e-mail. This is usually easy to do with a signature. Stick to three or less for easy navigating. This is a tip that may have worked better for traffic building, but these links still have some marrit here.
Link building is important, but often comes when you concentrate on quality content and traffic building.
Other Tips
Remember to focus on content and traffic. These things will get you where you need to go slowly but surely. You don’t need to find a way to cheat the system or work overly hard finding a magic combination. Instead, your hard work will pay off. Some other tips can be:
Update often. Updating your site, pages, and blogs makes them fresh. This is good for Google, but also good for your visitors. It is much nicer to go back to a site that has new information or pages then to go back to one that is always the same!
Allow comments. Whenever possible allow comments. This can build discussions, get your readers involved, get people coming back, and also looks like updates and changes to Google which can get your rank up there.
Reply to comments. Replying to comments can often get more comments and discussion. This is good and very important if people ask questions in their comments. Try to get your readers involved and working hard to comment.
Ask your readers questions in the hopes of encouraging them to post. You can also open it up for discussion on your site with simple phrases.
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I am by no means an expert. I have been doing this a little over a year and watched my page ranks slowly rise. These things continue to work for me and others like me. Content is still one of the biggest keys out there! Don’t forget that your content is important.
*If you have more tips to add, I would love to hear from you in the comment section.