What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.

Google defines PageRank: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

How can I find out what my site’s PageRank?

There are a few free tools out there to find out the page rank of websites:

1. Google Toolbar. This tool is installed as a toolbar on your browser, so you get to see the PageRank of any website you go to instantly and automatically.
2. IWebTool.com PageRank Tool. Enter your website URL in at the field there and click on the “Check” button. You will see your PageRank at the top of the page. You will also see a lot of bars next to the links on the page with different numbers. This shows you the PageRank of those specific pages without even having to enter in those specific pages to the tool.
3. PageRankTool.net. This tool checks your PageRank at the different Google data centers.

How long do I have to wait before I see changes on my PageRank?

PageRank has a long lag on when it updates. You may do a lot to your website to improve it’s PageRank and natural links for the search engines and not see any changes for up to 6 months or longer for your PageRank to be updated. This is going to just depend on Google.

PageRank For SEOs

The issue of links and search engines, in particular the perception of Google’s use of links, has gotten out of hand. For many, the original reason of linking has been lost out of the desire to simply do whatever they believe Google might like.

All major crawler-based search engines leverage links from across of the web, but none of them report a static ‘importance’ score in the way Google does via its Google Toolbar. That score, while a great resource for surfers, has also provided one of the few windows into how Google ranks web pages. Some webmasters, desperate to get inside Google, keep flying into that window like confused birds, smacking their heads and losing their orientation….

Site owners are using the toolbar to find “good” sites that they should get links from, regardless of the fact that link context is also important, not to mention many, many other factors that are used by Google to rank a web page. Other site owners, getting a gray PR0 toolbar for their site, immediate assume the worst, that they’ve been blacklisted.

PageRank is only a score that represents the importance of a page, as Google estimates it. Get a link to your pages from an high PR page and yes, some of that PageRank importance is transmitted to your page. But that’s doesn’t take into account the context of the link — the words in the link — the anchor text. If you don’t understand anchor text, Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases from me last month will take you by the hand and explain it more.

How to Increase Page Rank?

Few Steps to Increase your Page Rank:

1.  Update your website every day by adding more unique content. If you site has some information for a visitor then it is 100% chance for him to come back to your site again.

2.  Provide inside linking to your website. For example you can provide a link of your previous and next articles on an article page. Or you can provide a list of related articles so visitor can remains a long time on your website.

3.  Create sitemap for your website (XML based for Google and text based for yahoo) then submit sitemap to Google and submit sitemap to Yahoo. Get a Google webmaster account and sign in there to see your website statistics. It will also tell you if you site is indexed or not, and your page rank in Google.

4. The most important tips -  Trade your link with other web owners. Put their link on your website and they will put your link in them. This is for free and the very fast way to improve your visibility in search engines.

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Tags: Internet Marketing & SEO, pagerank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO