How to Increase Google PR (PageRank)

What is Google PageRank?

Google PageRank is one of numerous factors Google uses to determine the importance of a site and to decide if and where to rank it in their search results. It is based on the value of your inbound links. Google evaluates how many links there are to your site from other pages, and the relevance and quality of the linking sites. Links are not everything in SEO and are getting less and less important. Pagerank has recently become a less influential metric in Google’s algorithm but many still like to check their pagerank number just to have an easy number to follow their progress with. If you want to see what PageRank your site has, use a PR checker tool like this.

 

Effect of PR4 compared to PR0 on my search traffic

There is a lot of discussion about what exactly PageRank is and how exactly it affects my rankings in search engine results. I have now collected some analytics data and will try to show how the increase in Google PageRank affected my traffic and search engine rankings. From 25th October, when I started my site, until 31st December, when Google assigned me with PR4, I only got 121 visitors from search engines. That was 1.22% of my total traffic in that period and majority of this traffic was on searches for either my name or my domain name.

On 31st December Google had a PR update and assigned me with page rank 4. From 31st December until January 8th nothing much had changed. I still got sporadic search engine traffic only. But on January 8th I suddenly got 30 visitors from Google in one day. Since then the search engine traffic has been steadily growing. In 3 weeks since January 8th search engines have sent me 1420 additional visitors. More than 96% of these were from Google and traffic referred by search engines had a 10.86% share of my total traffic in January.

 

My top keyword phrases

Majority of traffic I get at the moment contains keywords and keyword phrases very close to my domain name. 6 of my top 10 keywords are closely related to my domain name and title. This shows me that it is very important to chose a domain name which contains relevant keywords or relevant keyword phrase to your topic. It will help you rank higher as Google places huge significance on the domain name and keywords in it. In January Google sent me 1490 visitors via 1019 different searches and keyword phrases. The best working keyword phrase brought only 100 visitors so this definitely shows the power of the long tail keywords. Here are some examples of keyword phrases that brought me visitors from Google during January:

• how to grow your twitter followers
• how to increase page rank of my site
• go viral on twitter
• how do i get ideas for my content
• insert ads between wordpress post
• step by step how to build a site on wordpress
• getting traffic via stumbleupon
• how to add a subscribe to my wordpress
• how to approach potential advertisers

I may not be able to rank top for the highly-popular but highly-competitive keywords, but if I have a lot of articles with a wide range of relevant keywords, and get a couple of daily clicks for each, I will have a healthy amount of search engine traffic daily. The long tail in action.

 

How you can increase your PageRank 

 

Major component of increasing your pagerank is to be found in the quality and the total amount of backlinks you have to your site. Backlinks are links from other sites to your own site and your content. Total number of links is self-explanatory but the quality of links depends on the relevance, context and popularity of the site that is linking to you. The original PageRank idea was based on citations and the fact that the number of citations a research paper has is a good way of judging its quality, credibility and influence. This is why working on increasing inbound links to your content is a key part of increasing your pagerank. I believe that the following factors have contributed towards Google assigning HowToMakeMyBlog with a PR4. Follow these tactics to increase your own Google PageRank.

• Guest posting

I wrote two guest posts at one of the biggest sites in my field. They were not only great for me to get exposure in front of a larger audience. Each of these posts has also given my site a high-quality, relevant inbound link as the site that hosted me is a PR7 site. Links from related and high ranked websites transfer more PageRank value than links from non-related or low quality sites. I highly recommend writing guest articles for relevant sites that are ranked with higher Google PageRank not only for pagerank value but also for branding and traffic. Read more about the powerful rules to follow when guest posting.

• Other inbound links

I was spreading my link out there by commenting on relevant and high-profile sites, being active in social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and by posting useful answers in relevant forums. I would recommend taking time each day to work on your promotion. Comment on relevant articles, discuss on relevant topics in forums/social media, and in other ways try to get your name and URL out there. This is my marketing routine for after publishing a new post.

• Onsite factors

Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated but if you are producing useful and sharable articles that makes people link to, comment to or share via social media, will give you valuable inbound links that will help increase your rank. I publish new articles regularly and make them as thrilling as they can be for my audience. I also optimize the internal linking in order to get more of my visitors explore more of my content archives.

A good rule of thumb I have for my own effectiveness is to spend half of my time producing content and the other half of my time promoting that content. This assures me to cover both needs of having a successful site and a good PageRank number. I hope this article shows you that it is possible to get traffic from Google and search engines, even if you have a new site and even if you are in a very competitive niche. Focus on getting quality links to your site and focus on writing quality content, and you will soon experience an increase in PageRank and in the traffic you get from search engines.