Let’s take a moment and talk about PageRank, what it is, and why it’s awesome. Essentially PageRank is your site’s “credit rating,” according to Google. The higher PR you have, the faster and easier you’ll rank. Let me relay a short story to give you a quick example of how increase google PageRank can dramatically impact your search rankings.
Tips to Increase Google Pagerank
I am a member of the Stack Overflow community. Stack Overflow is a fantastic website that allows community members to crowdsource their problems and let other community members discuss and solve them. It’s an excellent resource for programmers of all types to get together and help each other out and share tips and tricks. One day, I was having trouble with the Authorize.net API and getting it to perform a specific function with AJAX/PHP, so I logged on to Stack to give them the snippets of code I was using and ask for help.
After posting my question, I took a short break to rest my eyes and get a quick bite. Twenty minutes later, I hopped on to Google to search for more and see if I couldn’t answer my question. I typed in my keywords and question and hit submit, and my stack overflow question was result #2! In twenty minutes, Google crawled my question (fresh content on their site) and indexed it, and then ranked it (very high) for the appropriate terms. Often when googling a programming question, I notice the majority of page one results are from Stack Overflow.
Their PageRank is 7. They have good Google Credit.
And much like your credit score, the higher your PageRank, the better!
I was recently hired to help a web design company increase its visibility in the search engines. I plugged their website into my excellent software to see what I was getting in to with them. The domain had been around for 18 months, so it had decent domain age, and with full content pages, solid title tags, and a blog, I was having trouble seeing what the problem was.
And then I saw it: Traffic Travis showed their PageRank was a 0 – very bad. I decided the one-piece truly missing from this website was backlinks – the all praised, controversial Google ranking factor that has made and broken various businesses throughout the years.
I started a solid backlinking campaign by writing guest pieces and submitting them to various niche blogs (blogs that covered things like SEO, web design, graphic design, and other similar topics). I targeted traffic, quality blogs with a PR of 3 or higher, and made sure to include at least one link to my client’s blog within the content.
It was a slow, organic process that took a good deal of time – I had to create the content, find the blogs, and then email the authors to build a bit of rapport before asking them for a guest spot. However, within five articles and three weeks of guest posting, my client’s site jumped up to a PR 1 and is now regularly crawled and re-indexed by Google.
If you’re having a hard time getting your PageRank to increase and you’ve done every on-site optimizaton you can think of, try writing a few guest posts, comment on blogs and forums, leave links back in reviews – implement an organic backlinking strategy to make sure you get quality, targeted links pointing back to your site from other reputable sites.
Most site owners don’t mind this kind of thing and, as long as your content is quality, are pleased to have someone else contributing to the discussion.
Once you have a decent amount of links pointing back at your site, and you’ve done all of the on-page optimizations you can, you should find that your PageRank will continue to increase steadily.
