New Methods to Improve Your Page Rank

It's getting tougher and tougher to rank in search engines for certain keyphrases. In one sense this is good news: it means that when you plug a keyphrase into Google it means that you won't get a garbage site. Google doesn't toughen up its algorithm for calculating page rank just to make site owners suffer: it's about quality control. This being said, there are news ways to improve your site's page rank to help you site adapt to the Web 2.0 environment and beyond.

As Google updates its policies, certain practices have become outdated: such as article marketing. It used to be that you could upload the same article to a slew of article directories - either manually or using an article submission service - and you could build up hundreds of inbound links when the article went into syndication. Now Google will discard all of the duplicates and keep one: not even necessarily the one with the highest page rank. This can still bring in traffic from different article sites, but it cannot improve page rank.

Blog commenting is another one that has lost some of its usefulness. A lot of new site owners have never heard of the concept of nofollow. The nofollow tag is a tag put on links that looks like rel="nofollow" tag. So the code would end up looking like: < a onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://www.yoursite.com" target=" rel="nofollow" >. What this will do is ensure that Google spiders will not follow the link to your site: i.e. it will not affect page rank. Again, the link can improve traffic, but not your page rank.

Better Methods to Increase Page Rank

With these common pitfalls out of the way, what are some good ways to improve page rank given Google's new criteria.

1. Identify Nofollow links. Firefox, for example, has a dofollow plugin that will reveal which links on a site are dofollow or nofollow (blue for dofollow, red for nofollow). This is a good way to test a site's comment section. There are also dofollow directories, which link sites that have nofollow deactivated.

2. Write unique article content. It may be difficult to write ten different posts about the same topic, but it's recommended. You can then upload ten different articles to ten different article sites. Ten quality backlinks is much better than one. More time put in = more page rank value.

3. On your blog, don't just write basic information that may be covered elsewhere. Write topically: these are the articles that are the most likely to go viral. People like new news, not a new version on an old topic - however well-written it might be.

4. Get yourself the Google Adwords tool to determine the most marketable keywords in your niche: put these keywords in a title tag and content, without overdoing it. These older SEO tactics still work. You'd be surprised just how many sites still have a title that include a number, not the title of the post.

5. Register with Google Webmaster tools: it will reveal any problems with your HTML code, such as broken links. It will also help with faster spidering of your site.

6. Become a social networker. One thing that is overlooked about social networks is their page rank. It's not just about traffic from the network. Your Digg link could rank very highly for an important title and post - well before your own site. The more social networks you belong to, the more chance one of those results will show up in SERPs. These links will also improve the page rank of internal pages of your URL - very important to overall page rank health.

7. Become an avid forum poster. Just having a link to your site in your forum profile and signature is helpful - but the more active you are in the forums, the more page rank strength you will send to your profile. Forum signatures are also great for traffic. See tip #1 for revealing which forums use nofollow or dofollow links.

8. Manually add your site to directories. It's tedious but it's still important for your page rank. Don't rely on automated systems because a barrage of site directory links all at once can get you red-flagged by Google. Also, important: write different keywords and site descriptions before submitting your site. If you use the same description over and over this can be seen as duplicate content.

Finally, you should have a plan for all of the above strategies. Even if you have a modest goal of only five new links a day: through comments, directories (there are thousands of potential directories), forum posts, and so on, this will build up over time. By the time of the next Google page rank update, which occurs every three months or so, you will see positive results of your public page rank climbing higher.