How to Increase Page Rank

You need to know how to increase page rank in order to attract free web traffic from the search engines. Building page rank is basically about getting inbound links (backlinks) to your website. The more backlinks you have the higher your PR will be, and the more organic traffic your website will receive from Google and other search engines.

Search engines are relying heavily on links placed on other websites pointing 'back' to your site to decide which web pages are "worthy" of getting to the number one of their results pages when people make a query. They see a backlink as a vote for your site, so increasing the number of inbound links is how to increase page rank.

It's not the number of backlinks alone that influence on your page rank however; both the quality of the linking sites, the relevance of those sites, contextual linking, and the use of anchor text in your links are factors that are weighted for each inbound link.

So, in order to build page rank, you have to get lots of backlinks. How do you 'gather' links? There are a number of ways. First and foremost, include useful, high-quality information on your site - create content that users want and will share with others. Then they will link to your pages, they will bookmark them on bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, and they will tell their friends.

This way you can get lots of free inbound links, and your links will grow naturally and come from a variety of different sites, which is exactly the way Google likes links to come. Therefore, work hard on creating the best possible - and preferably unique - content on your web pages, and the number of backlinks will grow steadily. This is how to increase page rank at its best.

However, there are many methods to generate backlinks by which you will be doing something yourself to have other sites link back to yours. The most common tactics are...

• Publishing articles on article directories
• Submitting your website to web directories
• Exchanging links with other websites
• Commenting on other people's blogs
• Posting on Question&Answer sites like Yahoo! Answers
• Using Twitter, Facebook and other networking sites
• Using bookmarking sites
• Participating in forums
• Providing an RSS feed on your website
• Using link building services and tools
• Buying links

Get in-depth explanation on these strategies on our link building and social media marketing pages.

There are a few other things to bear in mind when considering how to increase page rank also. Here are a couple more factors that might influence your page rank:

Give Away Your Content
Give your readers permission to copy and distribute the content on your web pages - provided they give you credit for the content and a link to your site. You can make your own conditions for using your content, or use the Creative Commons License as a model.

If most of your site's content is commercial, for example pages about your business, try to add other pages with useful, "generic" information for the public. For instance, if you sell bicycles, add pages with tips on bicycling, about bicycle paths, bicycle gear etc.

Keep Your Website Up
If your website is not accessible for an extended period of time, Google may reduce the ranking of your site. So make sure you have reliable web hosting that can guarantee your site a maximum of up-time.

Search Google For Your Website
When loading your website, search Google for your site instead of entering your URL (web address) into your browser. Google is more inclined to improve the ranking of a site that people seek and visit than one that gets no traffic from Google.

The answer to 'how to increase page rank' includes many other factors that Google takes into account, like...

• If your site is growing links gradually and naturally
• How long the links persist
• The click through rate (how many searchers actually click on your site on the search engine result page)
• How much time your visitors spend on your website

...and a few more factors explained here.

Google every now and then changes how it calculates a site's importance, so don't try to keep up with the latest search engine optimization (SEO) tricks. Instead, strive to provide useful, unique content that is helpful to people, then the backlinks will come. That's how to increase page rank and eventually attract free organic traffic to your website.

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