Watching Your PageRank Soar from 0 to 10

Out of the three major search engines to optimize for, your biggest payoff will no doubt be from optimizing for Google. Google is the top dog and doesn’t show any chance of losing that title, therefore putting the most effort in getting your site to the top of Google’s pages should be what you’re striving for.

There are on-page and off-page optimization techniques. Majority focused wholly on on-page but now it’s time to touch on the opposite. Your off-page techniques will be actually what make the biggest difference in your rankings.

It has the ability to catapult your website right onto the first page of Google if you get it right. Linking is the essence of off-page optimization – more specifically, getting links to your site called inbound links.

This is as opposed to outbound links which are links coming from your website to another. This hugely important to Google, so much so that they actually have a way of measuring your linking popularity, called Google PageRank (often referred to as PR).

PageRank has many factors but what it is basically is a popularity vote for your website - a popularity vote in fact that Google keeps close watch of. With PageRank, not only does it matter how many inbound links you get – but also who you get them from – plus what their PR is as well. It’s measured on a scale from 0 to 10.

Obviously the higher the number you have the better. You’ll want to try to be to the greater number of 5 or 6. It’s very difficult to get much higher, for example as of standings right now, Amazon.com is at a PageRank of 7, eBay is at a 9, AOL is also at 9, and not surprising Google is at a perfect 10.

However, that’s not to say that it is a flawed system by any means – if you consider how many pages actually link to Google. Getting inbound links from sites with a high PageRank will in turn help you raise your PageRank, therefore helping you get a much better rank in the search engines.

So how do you know what PageRank for your site is? The easiest way is to download the Google Toolbar onto your computer. This way you just have to type in the URL of your website and it will show you exactly what your PageRank is.

The Google Toolbar uses a green indicator bar that tells you what your rank is. You can see the actual number by just holding the arrow over the bar, it will then read the number by the your PR number out of 10 (e.g. 6/10)

Here’s where to get the toolbar: http://toolbar.google.com You can also keep an eye on competing websites, and see exactly what they’re doing to obtain high PageRank, and duplicate their methods. (Methods not content!)

Once you know your PageRank, You’ll want to start getting links from good solid sites to increase it. There are various methods in which people have tried to automate this called link farms, link automation, etc.

This isn’t a good way to raise your PageRank because these are not relevant sites that Google loves. Your financial well being relies on Google so you must actually take the time to do it right, and get links most naturally, from sites that are worthy in Google’s eyes.

You won’t see an instant rise in your PageRank. Most often you’ll see this after a little shakeup of things, that’s referred to as the Google Dance. This is what Google does now and then to get rid of spam sites, link farms, etc., and to reward those sites that are doing all those things that Google approves of with better rankings.

It’s a tough system, yet one that you can win by not trying to create shortcuts – but by building solid informative pages. Google loves thems!