How to Improve the Page Rank of Your Website

Page Rank (often denoted by PR) is Google’s ranking software that calculates the relevance of a webpage with its content. Page Rank is a quantity (between 0 and 10) defined by Google that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page. The Google Toolbar can be obtained free of charge for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Google has a page rank of 10 which is the highest your site can attain. The PR of your site is updated about once of month when Google updates their database of web pages. It exports new backlinks, PageRank, or directory data approximately every three months.

One highly effective method for attracting more web traffic is to first optimize the design of your web site. This will increase your page rank because search engines love sites that have clean code, are fast loading and contain lots of well written content. This ultimately results in gaining traffic which leads to more sales, a sign you have developed a profitable web site.

Below are few factors which can be incorporated to improve page rank of your website:

1.Backlinks are vital

Links to and from your site are an important off page factor for determining PageRank. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be. You can always check out your backlinks by querying Google using its link operator.

Learn how to increase the backlinks

All the links are not Equal – Quality, Relevancy and Quantity of Links Effect PageRank

Quality of Links Links with high PR, who link to your page, carry more weightage than links with equal or less PR.

Relevancy of Links However, relevancy of links is equally important. If your website is about selling online lays chips and you want to get a backlink from a interior designing website then it is irrelevant.

Google looks to title tag an on page criterion of incoming links to determine relevancy and similarity. Pages whose relevancy are equal or similar to your page are given more weight.

Another relevancy criterion for incoming links is how pages link to you. Ideally, you want the incoming link to use your keyword in its anchor text. For instance, if you want to create a link for “how to increase backlinks” then anchor text should be increase backlinks not click here.

Quantity of Links If a high-ranking page links to your page, it has value. However, if the high ranking page links to you and a hundred other pages it has less value. Essentially, the voting weight of the incoming link is divided among all the links on that page.

Another quantity issue is “link Mills”/ “Link Farms”. A link mill is a page with nothing but links on it. Linking to link farms or mills can be extremely harmful. These “bad neighborhoods” are often banned sites.

The final quantity issue is timeliness of links. Too many links to your site too quickly sends a flag to Google.

In addition to taking into account the number of links to your page and the ranking of the linking page, to compute a page’s PageRank, Google considers hundreds of other factors including

– the click through rate (CTR) of Google’s search results, cached pages, favorites on the Google Toolbar

– when your site acquired the links

– how fast a site is gaining links

– the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness of your site in retaining individual users)

2.Update your website every day by adding more unique content

If your site has unique content for the visitors they will surely revisit your site.

3.Include useful high-quality information on your site

Web copy that is well written will naturally drive more traffic. And Make sure that you have your targeted keywords included in the content on your pages in a natural way. It will help your website listed in various search engines. Website owners reading your content will naturally want to link to your site without even asking for a link back.

4.Provide inside linking to your website

Internal links are links between internal pages of a website. For example if you have written an article to enhance the page rank of the website it could be interlinked with another article which is about page rank.

5.Create a sitemap for your website

Create sitemap (XML based for Google and text based for yahoo) then submit sitemap to Google and submit sitemap to Yahoo. Get a Google webmaster account and sign in there to see your website statistics. It will also tell you if your site is indexed or not, and your page rank in Google.

6.Publicize your site to everyone with whom you communicate

Add your site’s URL to every piece of communication you initiate. Your Web address should be listed everywhere that your phone/fax number and mailing address e.g.,

– Letterhead

– Business cards

– Newsletters

– Brochures

– Press Releases

– Fax cover sheets

– Email signatures

7.Write a newsletter and send it out.

Inform people what’s new or remarkable on your site. The newsletter will remind people about your site and encourage them to visit to find appealing content.

8.Provide a Rich Site Summary (RSS).

RSS is “a lightweight XML format for distributing news headlines and other content on the Web.”

In addition to making it easy for other sites to distribute your headlines and content, your RSS feed will be indexed by popular Blog search engines, including Technorati, BlogSearch, and Ask.com Bloglines.

9.Keyword density:

Keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines. For example if your webpage is of “Page rank” and if you have used the keyword “page rank” only once in your webpage of thousand words then it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length. Then the page wont be listed for that particular keyword since its keyword density is low.

So in order to improve your site’s placement in the search engine results one needs to work on the keyword density on his page.

10.Perform the necessary Keyword research.

Keyword research plays very important role in determining the page rank. Your web copy is filled with words that visitors enter in the search engines. Intertwine these words throughout the content of your web site.

11.Construct meta tags that include your targeted keywords

Make sure you write an attractive description for your description meta tag. This gets listed first to the visitors when search engine find your website relevant for that keyword. If the description does not capture your visitor’s attention immediately you will lose your visitor to a competing web site.

12.Construct a meaningful Title tag.

The title tag is what visitors will see at the top of the browser window when your site first appears. It is the most important tag to consider when designing your web site. Place your main keywords at the beginning of the title tag. Don’t place you site’s name first. Most visitors will not be searching for your site name. They find you with the keywords they entered in the search engines.

13.Use heading tags for the headings and sub headings of your web site content.

Incorporate your keywords in to tags. Search engines give a little more weightage to these tags. They also grab your visitor’s attention faster than normal text.

14.Name files using your targeted keywords

When naming your css, image, javascript files etc, include your targeted keywords. Don’t use the same keywords again and again in every file. It may be flagged as keyword spamming by the search engines.

15.Include keywords in page and directory names

Instead of giving your pages generic names, be creative and incorporate keywords in their urls.

For example rather than giving names to your pages like page1.htm, page2.htm… try to incorporate the keywords in their names, like improve-page-rank.htm will be a better choice for a webpage which is about improving the page rank of a webpage.

This will help the search engines to identify the keywords in your page url. If a site owner links to this page you will benefit by already having your keywords in your web page address.

16.Use keywords in your link text

If the links on your page have relevant keyword text in them, your page will receive higher rankings in the search engine results than those sites that don’t.

For example, a link on your with the text “improve your page rank” will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for “page rank” than if the link simply said “click here.”

17.Optimize your images

Try to avoid using images to display important names, content, or links. Search engines don’t spider images only text. Use ALT tags if any of the main content on your web page can’t be written in regular HTML.

18.Create external files

Instead of loading your site with lots of css or javascript code, place all the code in an external file between your header tags. This will drastically reduce the load time of your pages and allow the search engines to easily spider your site.

19.JavaScript & SEO

JavaScript and images, conveys nothing to a search engine. The second thing is size. Search Engines actually have a limit to how much page content they will crawl. For instance, Googlebot has a 100 kb limit. Even though the Googlebot directive is to search for keywords and phrases, which are placed after the 100 kb limit are invisible to it.

Don’t overload the HEAD section of your page with styles and scripts. Instead, you should link to external files.

20.Proximity & Hierarchy

Before you start optimizing the individual pages consider the closeness of keywords and phrases to the beginning of a page. The importance of the webpage decreases from left to right and from top to bottom. So the top left part of a webpage has highest importance. The search engine spider will read the content which is in the beginning of the page BEFORE the actual content of the page. For example if you have links tabs in the page, it is more important than the actual content of the page. Whereas human visitors generally ignore the links first and directly jump to the content of the page.

Search Engines also consider textual hierarchy. Just like writing an exam paper, a search engine looks for code clues to understand the outline of your page. To a spider, text in heading tag is more important than the normal text. Similarly bold, italicized, or underlined text has more importance than the plain text.

Google periodically changes how it calculates a page’s importance, thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance.