For those in the search engine optimisation industry Page Rank can become an obsession, a web status symbol and an important factor which influences the ranking of your website in Google, the world’s major search engine.

What is Google Page Rank?

If you have not heard of the term Google Page Rank before it is a rating or score out of 10 for a web page that Google regularly calculates every 3 months or so. New websites or websites with a limited amount of content or links pointing to the site will generally have a low Page Rank of between 0 and 2, whilst websites which have been on the Internet for some time, have many pages and a large number of inbound links may have a higher page rank of 4 and above. Very few Australian websites on the Internet today have a Page Rank value higher than 6.

Generally the higher the Page Rank of your website the more often Google and other search engines will visit your website to re-index your website information. This process provides websites with a higher page rank the ability to achieve higher search engine rankings more quickly.

To view the Page Rank of your website or any other website, simply download the Google Toolbar and select Page Rank as an option to be displayed in your browser.
How do you improve your Page Rank?

To a large extent Page Rank is related to the link popularity of your website, however, the Page Rank score of your website is not just based on the number of inbound links to your site, a key factor is the strength and quality of the links.
Some tips on how to improve your Page Rank:

Internal Website links
Internal linking can play a role in the Page Rank of the pages within a site. On most occasions the homepage will have the highest Page Rank of the website. The internal links within your website should follow a themed approach which highlights the importance of minimising linking between the 2nd and 3rd level directories and web pages.

External Linking
External inbound links are the most important factor which influences the Page Rank score of your website. The challenge for any website owner is that there is no way to force another website to link to yours, particularly, if the other website already has a higher Page Rank than yours.

This is why your linking strategy requires some serious thought to ensure your website benefits with improved rankings from your link building efforts.
The risks associated with Link Building

Finding and sourcing quality external link partners is very time consuming plus there can be a significant risk that your website is unknowingly linked to a bad Internet neighbourhood. If your website receives links from any websites that have been associated with any activity which goes against the guidelines of the major search engines, there is a serious risk your website could be penalised and removed from the search results for a period of time.

Given the time and complexity attached to developing a winning linking strategy, plus increasing the Page Rank of your website we recommend that website owners engage the services of a reputable professional SEO firm who can manage this process on your behalf.

If you are interested in delivering qualified traffic to your website talk to ROI.com.au about how we can help you improve your businesses page rank.