Page Rank is the number of people that link to you and how important those links are.
Pank Rank is used by Google to analyse the hyperlinks of a web page and it is used to help Google measure how important a website is. Page Rank is a link analysis mathematical algorithm.
The value of incoming links is referred to as “Google juice”.
What is Google juice?
Google Juice is the value that Google gives your site, for having a high authority link from a good quality and relevant site. The value slowly builds up for each high quality link, helping you get better search rankings! Obviously you have to have other SEO elements added to your site as well!
The theory behind Page Rank is that the most important pages on the Internet are the pages with the most links leading to them. People do tend to link more to relevant content and pages with more links to them are usually better resources than pages that nobody links to. Page Rank considers links as votes, so a page linking to another page could be considered as a vote for those websites, which to Google is considered more important.
Page Rank also looks at the importance of the page that contains the link. Pages with higher Page Rank have more weight in “voting” with their links than pages with lower Page Rank. It also looks at the number of links on the page casting the “vote.” Pages with more links have less weight. How this is determined is that pages that are important are probably better authorities in leading visitors to high quality resources, and pages that have more links are likely to be less discriminating on where they are linking. That is they will send you any where, may be spammy and non relevant links!
How Can I See Page Rank?
Page Rank is measured on a scale of one to ten and assigned to individual pages within a website, not the entire website. To find the PageRank of a page just go to your favourite browser and search for Page Rank addon for that browser. Install the addon and then at the top of your browser you will see an icon which will rank each page from 1-10. A good page rank for an average sized website may be between 4 and 6. Obviously the higher authority the site is the higher the page rank – for e.g. YouTube has a Page Rank of 9.
How Can I Increase My Page Rank?
You need to put in some hard work to increase your Page Rank. Including:
Building good quality back links
Back links are other blogs or websites linking back to your website.
Back links need to be:
- High quality – that is have a good Page Rank between 4-6 to start with is good!
- The back links must be relevant to the information presented in your website for e.g. if you sell clothes, don’t link to a site that sells cars
Reciprocal links
You can swap links with other websites, but only swap links to relevant websites. Also be aware of adding your website to a link farms. Link farms are websites that add your website pages to many directories or websites that may or may not be related to the information or content in your website. Link farming is considered a big “no no” to Google!
Add your website to directories
You can add your website to many directories including local and global depending on the nature of your website, such as:
- Yahoo Directory
- Hot Frog (Australian only)
- True Local (Australian only)
- StartLocal (Australian only)
- Try to use directories with a high Page Rank where possible
Building internal links
When you are building the web pages within your website, create some internal back-links by linking to relevant pages within your own website.
- Don’t put too many internal links in each page, as this may be confuse your visitors
- Keep it simple, clear and concise
- Having internal links is meant to make life easier for your visitors to navigate your website!
- Only relevant internal links
Good keyword enriched content
The best way to increase your Page Rank is to have quality content with appropriate keywords for each article you write so that other people and websites want to link to you naturally!
Original content written by Jodi Allbon 2013
