Understanding Page Rank for Link Building

PageRank (PR) is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. Your page is ranked 1-10, 10 being the highest award. It’s one of many factors used to determine which pages appear in search results. You can check the PR of any page on your website using a page rank checker, you can even use it to check the page rank of another site during your linking campaign. PageRank measure’s a web page’s importance. The theory is that the most important pages on the Internet are the pages with the most links leading to them.

• PageRank thinks of links as votes, where a page linking to another page is casting a vote and thus points are awarded for your PR.
• PageRank also takes into account the importance of the page that contains the link. Pages with higher PageRank have more weight in “voting” with their links than pages with lower PageRank.
• PR also looks at the number of links on the page casting the “vote.” Pages with more links have less weight, Google sees a page with lots of links as a potential Link Farm (more about that later) and therefore lowers its voting weight or even penalises the link.

You can see how important effective link building is to your Search Engine ranking.

Bad Link Building

OK, now we all know that Google takes linking as one of the most important factors in your google listing, it is easy to understand how it can be manipulated. Google however, are not daft, they are wise to all the tricks in the book, so before your mind runs away with you and you set out to get as many links as you can, relevant or not, then be warned:

Link farming is the practice of linking without thought of the relevance of the pages being linked. If you’ve ever run into a web page that was nothing but a collection of random links to other websites, you may have run into a link farm. Google has adapted their calculations to filter off possible link farms. This is one reason why submitting your website to directories with low or no PageRank may be a bad idea. If you find your website linked in a link farm, don’t panic. In most cases this has no effect at all on your ranking. You can’t control who links to you, anyway. Just don’t link back to link farms and don’t submit your site to them intentionally.

Increasing PageRank With Effective Linking

If you’d like to increase your PageRank, you need to get other websites to link to your website.

Think of links as:

• outgoing – you linking to them
• incoming – them linking to you
• reciprocal – linking to each other both ways
• internal links – links within your website

Outgoing links are exactly that, links to other pages externally. So if in writing your article on SEO you would like to suggests a page rank checker tool on another website then this is an external link. External / outgoing links are good for content and for your reader, but don’t overdo it as goggle may then think your page is some sort of link farm, with lots of incoming and outgoing links,

Now reciprocal linking is ok, but a two way or reciprocal link has much less weight since google is aware people trade links to raise ranking. You will not be penalised for reciprocal links, but make sure you only trade relevant links, and make sure you’re not trading links with a link farm. However, bare in mind, link swapping, mass article submission, purchasing links and even newer techniques such as link baiting will never be good long-term strategies.

Incoming Links are great. You want to get as many good incoming and one way links as possible. You can even register your website with directories, such as the Open Directory Project, but use directories with high PageRank whenever possible, these type of links don’t carry as much weight.

As you build web pages within your website, you can create some of your own back-links or internal links by linking to relevant pages within your own website. When writing a tutorial if you reference another then by all means link to it. Remember that the number of links you create counts into the equation, but, don’t overdo it.

The best way to increase your PageRank is to have quality content that other people want  to link. So start article writing, start blogging and you wont have to even think about building links as people will just link to you naturally.

One of the most important things to pay attention to are the words used in the linking text. That is the text used to create the link – the text between the anchor tags. Google assumes that this text suggests the content of the page and therefore it is used in assigning page ranking for particular words. So if you are writing a page about “benefits of black coffee” and that is your keyword phrase, then try to get all your links to that page to include that keyword phrase. Here are some more tips:

1. Present unique or insightful information. If you want other sites to link to you without anything in return, you need to provide something that’s worth linking to. Don’t just regurgitate what can be found everywhere, do your own research, add your own opinions, or present information in a new way.
2. Build something useful. Create a tool, service or web app which people will want to use. Solve a problem and make life easier.
3. Make linking to you easy. Perhaps most importantly, capitalize on those that may want to share your website but are inexperienced or lazy. Provide “link to this page” code, with well-chosen link text already filled in. Provide buttons and banners with your site or service logo to use. Encourage your users to make use of these tools to share your site.

You may also like to read:

• What is Google Page Rank?
• Quality vs Quantity Links
• A Brief Intro to Link Building for Small Business Owners
• Backlinks- all you ever need to know about SEO
• Internal SEO

Effective Link Building To Improve Page Rank is a post from: Build Me A Fab Website