Knowing and increasing your Google Page Rank is mandatory for any webmaster looking to be noticed and successful online. It not only increases your position in the search engine results and generates free traffic, it also increases your credibility in the internet universe by telling visitors that your site is considered to be important… all of which are necessary criteria contributing to your website’s success.
Google’s page rank system is an extremely complicated patented algorithm which is frequently changed or updated. Outside of Google, no one person knows what all of the variables are – probably not even the person who oversees the code. So, anyone claiming to be a Google rank check “authority” should be viewed with caution. what works today, may not work tomorrow! Still, there are some things we do know about how Google Page Rank works.
Google says that pages they believe are important get a higher page rank than others. Pages with higher rank tend to appear higher in the search results, although you will see something like “page rank 5″ pages occasionally ranking higher than “pagerank 7″ pages for a specific search.
Google also sees the links on a page or website acting as a “vote” for other pages. So, if a highly ranked page links to your site, Google sees that as a “credible endorsement” and you get more “juice” out of it than when a friend with no page rank links to your site.
Most experts agree that backlinks from .gov and .edu sites have higher link juice than other top level domains because they are restricted to “non-commercial” and/or non-profit organizations. One way to get .edu links is to take out online ads on college newspaper sites.
However, it’s good to remember that any links from PR 2 or higher site can help your page rank. One way to get links is to post comments on sites with a decent page rank. But make sure that Google “follows” the links on the page first. Some webmasters set their sites up with “No Follow” settings so that you don’t get any link juice from your posts or comments. To find out what sites do and do not allow links to be followed you can download free software on the internet such as Comment Kahuna, Comment Hut and others by doing a simple search.
Other ideas for increasing your page rank include:
- Join forums and post a link back to your website in your signature. Every time you make a post, you’ll get link juice.
- Submit your site to directories. Each directory which lists you will give you more of a chance of being listed higher in Google’s search results.
- Add an ezine to your site. Not only will this allow you to keep up with the people who visit your site, but you can also post information about your ezine to ezine directories.
- Publish articles on the article sites. You can drive traffic to your sites this way. But, high PR article sites also give you link juice.
- Create a sitemap on your website. This lets Google know how to index your page.
- Link to other pages within your web site. Putting links to the internal pages within the web site allows you to increase your link juice.
- Continue building pages within your site. Every page you create and link back to your home page increases the strength of your home page’s PR.
One way to track Page Rank for yourself and the sites you visit, is to install the Google toolbar. It will display the page rank (if turned on in settings) and display a small bar indicating the Page Rank. I personally use this and find it to be an extremely handy add-on toolbar for my browser with lots of options that can easily be set. Especially handy since I also use Gmail. 
Monitoring your Page Rank is easy and can help you see how you are faring against similar sites or your competition. Learning how to improve your ranking will give you dramatic results in traffic and search results. Don’t overlook this.
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