There is a lot of talk about PageRank, but how important is
it? PageRank, or PR is basically an indication of your
websites popularity, measured by links to the site.
When the search engine spiders crawl a site they follow the
links on the page, provided that they are not directed by
HTML code not to. Each link they come across that points a
site is counted as a vote for that site. These votes tally
up to equal the PR for the site. Actually there is more to
it than just that but in a nutshell, this is how it works.
Each link to your homepage or another page on your site
will add a bit to the PR. Not all votes are equal though,
the PR of the linking site is also factored into the
equation. It is almost as if the linking site is sharing
their PR with you. The higher the PR of the linking site,
the more weight their vote carries. This doesn't mean that
a link from a PR1 site will somehow hurt your PR as some
would have you believe. Generally links to your site cannot
hurt your PageRank.
This is not necessarily the case with outbound links from
your site though, so you need to be careful who you link
to. Before I get too deep into that, let's take a step back
and discuss some common ways sites develop links, then we
can cover the pitfalls.
Link exchanges are a common way to get links to your site.
Basically you put a link on your site and another webmaster
adds a link to your site on one of their pages. Linking
from a page with hundreds or even thousands of unrelated
links to your site is not a good plan. The "vote" would be
so diluted from the other links so as to be almost
meaningless. But more important, if you link back to the
other site and that site ends up being "banned" by the
search engines, you will be penalized for pointing to a
banned site. This will kill your PageRank!
It is a good practice to check all of your linking partners
at least monthly to make sure of two important things.
First, make sure they are still linking to you. Second,
make sure they have not been banned. If you find they have
deleted your link, ask them to replace it. if however, you
find that the other site has been banned you should
immediately remove their link from your site. If you
continue to link to a banned site, your PR will suffer.
Linking is an important SEO strategy and as long as you
keep an eye on your link partners it makes sense to
exchange links. A better strategy, or one to use in
addition, is generating one way links to your site. These
are links that other sites put up that point to your site
without you having to link to them. There are many ways to
develop these one way links. Remember, they can never hurt
you because, in theory, you have no control over them.
below are four quick tips to get one-way links.
1. Post comments on public forums, articles, blogs, etc.
with a link to your site.
2. Submit your original content to social bookmarking sites
like StumbleUpon, Technorati, or any of the hundreds of
other social sites on the net.
3. Submit articles on your topic to article databases and
include a link to your site in the article resource box.
4. Pay for them. Although this is not my favorite way to
develop them, it is available.
When you develop a linking strategy and stick to it you
will quickly develop more links to your site than you would
think. This will not only increase your PageRank, it will
increase the overall traffic to your site.
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Rob Emmerson is a leading expert in SEO and has written
extensivly on the subject in articles and eBooks. He offers
a free SEO Course at http://www.theseosecretrevealed.com .
in addition he writes a Blog on SEO at
http://www.robemmerson.com
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