How to Improve Your Site’s PageRank Score

Improve Your Site’s PageRank

You are familiar with the term “PageRank”. Aren’t you?

Oops… Not “Page Rank”, “Pagerank” or “Page-rank” friends. It’s PageRank!

Even if you are not familiar with how PageRank is being calculated, at least, you know the PageRank of your site. Don’t you? If you haven’t bothered yet to find out, check your site’s PageRank now.

PageRank

Basically, PageRank is a score reflecting the Google’s opinion on how important a web page is. It is one of the factors being considered when listing web pages in Google search results too. No wonder why bloggers and webmasters worry too much about their score. As long as Google awarded as the web search giant, the obsession of PageRank won’t be fade away.

If you are too obsessed about PageRank, remember you are being too dependent on the Google’s opinion. But if you know the idea and do it right, it will be a long-term investment. No regrets in future when Google releases their next Zebra update.

When calculating the PageRank, Google do rely on links point to a web page and count them as votes. Not every vote has the same weight though. It may depends on the relevancy of the link and importance of the referring page too.

PageRank matters. But not as you may think it is. Matt Cutts has an interesting video describing how important the PageRank is to rank well in Google search results.

If you are interested in digging into the subject, read more about PageRank.

Where Do You Stand?

What is your PageRank now? Are you satisfied? If you are seeking ways to get your score up, let’s take a look at few things you can do. It’s mostly about getting more links pointed at your site aka backlinks.

You can find very interesting posts and articles online on how bloggers increased their PageRank in a short period of time. But some of them got hurt by recent Panda and Penguin updates.

Still Google working on delivering the best user experience for their searchers. So just don’t apply strategies rightaway, but think about if it’s the right thing to do. Else, sooner or later, Google will take action and your efforts will get hurt.

Improve Your PageRank

Prior to the tactics, I’d like to mention a wonderful post written by Lisa on how you can generate backlinks. Simple and to the point. In that blog post you can find some ways to generate backlinks too.

Commenting

Commenting on other blogs is a well-known strategy to build backlinks to your site. But it’s rather effective if the blog you are commenting has a good standing and relevant to your own niche.

Actually, just leaving a comment won’t create an effective backlink for your site. By default, the external links within comments section are attributed with nofollow attribute and even you left your site link when you comment, Googlebots won’t consider it as a vote.

The blog you are commenting should allow outgoing links within the comments section to be followed by Googlebots. Not the technical term, but we usually call it a “DoFollow” blog. If the outgoing links can be followed, Googlebots can lead to your site from the commented blog. Indirectly, it will act as a voting too.

Then, you need to make sure you leave your blog or website URL while commenting on other blogs. Not within your comment, but in the relevant field. Else you will be considered as a spam.

For example, take a look at below comment form and you can find the highlighted text field which is labeled as “Website”. Don’t leave it empty and enter your site’s URL when you are commenting.

If you are using other types of commenting profiles such as Disqus, IntenseDebate etc., make sure to mention your blog or website URL in your profile too.

Submission to Website Directories

Registering and submitting your site link to website directories is another popular methodology to flow PageRank to your site by creating more backlinks pointing to your site.

If you Google for website directories, you will find articles listing dozen of website directories with higher PageRank and popularity. Finding popular and quality directories is the key.

Submitting your links to low quality website directories can hurt your site’s popularity and PageRank.

Participate in Communities / Forums

Participating in relevant communities and forums is a great way to create backlinks to your site. It doesn’t mean you should spam with all your links in them, but you can answer the questions and engage in discussions you can contribute.

Take the opportunity in there by mentioning your site URL in your community or forum profile. Further, mentioning it in your signature is a great way to promote it and drive more traffic to your site. As you build your authority, you will create more backlinks and it will aid your site to improve the PageRank too.

But if you are just trying to find link love and spam always, you will be get banned sooner. Or you will get bored in the end and find you wasted your time.

Guest Blogging

So many guest bloggers out there looking for backlinks. Haven’t you got any emails inquiring guest blogging opportunities yet?

Guest blogging on popular blogs can get you high quality links pointing to your site too. As author bio states guest bloggers’ site links, they will act as backlinks.

But the links in author bio area are not effective as natural links in your post or article. The links in author bio are generated intentionally to give credit to the author and his site. So it doesn’t act as a recommendation. Google is smarter in spotting them, but it doesn’t mean they are useless after all.

If you can add relevant links to your own site within the post, that’s much effective on improving your site’s PageRank.

Remember, guest blogging has more benefits than just expecting backlinks out of it.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a popular technique to create backlinks and to improve visibility online. Therefore, it helps boosting PageRank too.

It has been proven that social bookmarking sites sending more traffic to interesting content since they start to evolve on the web. Some of the popular social bookmarking websites are as follows,

• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Dilicious
• Newsvine
• Diigo

Many users were trying to abuse those platforms wanting to create backlinks to their own sites. It’s not a secret after all. Even they allow us to generate enough backlinks, I believe Google has their own point of view about them and may have lower the weight on them. Definitely, you will need more backlinks from there to improve PageRank.

Internal Linking

Interconnecting your own pages within your site is considered as another strategy to lower the bounce rate of your site. Further, it can be very helpful in improving PageRank too.

The relevancy of your internal links can be greatly affected on how much it can contribute on improving your site’s PageRank, and excessive internal links can be hurt your SEO efforts too.

Be careful with internal linking and always think about improved user experience too.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t matter if your site has more than enough backlinks from high quality sites and directories on the web, unless you have qualitative content.

More guidance on building high-quality sites.

I know you just love to have high quality backlinks and see your site’s PageRank goes higher and higher. While you are in that process, do try generating qualitative and unique content.

Further, make use of the SEO techniques available to help search engines to find your interesting content too.

As you focus on most of the aspects, you don’t need to be a workaholic to create backlinks or get others to vouch on your content. Others publishers will naturally start to link and recommend your content.

Else, even after 10 years, still you will have to spend a lot of your time on generating backlinks, instead of allocating more of your time to create high quality content.

Make sure to understand the limits. If you trying to apply too much, it can also hurt your SEO efforts too.

I hope you are now familiar with some strategies to improve your PageRank. Mostly, I just wanted to grab your attention on some misconceptions. Hope my thoughts will direct you into long-term plans.

What else you were following and how effective they were? Let us all know about them

I’m sure we can learn from each other very well.

Image Credits: FreeDigitalPhotos