I know everyone that cares about the pagerank of their websites have noticed by now that Google has just performed a pagerank update. 

As I was checking the PR of some blogs, I stumbled across this post titled “Secret is out – How google ranks websites”. I think it’s worth reading so here’s the link to the orginal post.

One of the best ways to get high rankings in the search engines and ultimately get high pagerank with Google is article marketing. This is a very strong way to not only get backlinks but also get tons of visitors to your site.

When you write an article and submit it to the various article dirctories such as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articledashboard.com, you have an option to place one or two backlinks to your site using your chosen anchor text. Some directories even let you add the links directly in the articles, so you should make use of that option.

Besides getting backlinks to increase your site’s ranking in the SERPS, article directories are very useful in pushing traffic to your site. If you write highly relevant articles to your niche, if the articles are unique and informative, and if your articles have a strong call to action (in our case clicking on the hyperlink that goes to our site), a very targeted niche population will be visiting your site. It is not for nothing that article marketing works. Some people actually get sales just from individuals clicking on the websites from the articles.

There are some heavy article marketeers around that are making their living only from writing to push sales. Interestingly another name for article marketing is ‘bum marketing’ started a while ago by a guy called Travis who started it all. The called it ‘bum marketing’ because it’s so easy to make money with article marketing that one could take a bum from the streets and push him to make money only by writing.

Once you write your articles and they get approved at the various ezines, make sure that you ping the article at the various pinging sites. One of them is Pingler.com. This will notify the relevant sites that your site or page has been updated and it can be crawled away. Also if your bio page at the relevant article directory site has an RSS feed, don’t forget to send it to RSS directories. This will propagate your site to lots of other sites giving you instant backlinks from all over the place.

Article marketing works very well, but some people are either lazy, or don’t like to write, or don’t know how to write well (or so they think). If you have any of these problems, you can very easily outsource your articles at places like Elance.com or iFreelance.com or Guru.com. There are practically thousands of hungry article writers who are willing to write your articles for very good prices. Usually the turnaround is also very fast. As soon as you get back your articles, post them at the various Ezines, then ping and RSS them for faster indexing by the search engines, so they can give you high PR link juice.

Maybe the most crucial aspect of getting a high PR is getting targeted traffic to your website. Without traffic, without visitors, your site is sitting empty and Google won’t give it a second thought.

One of the important ways to get traffic to your website is PPC, or paid per click advertising. PPC is great if you know what to do, but in the hands of a newcommer it might prove financially deadly. With PPC you basically pay for the traffic. For each click you get to your site, you pay. And if the click is not profitable, if you don’t make sales, those clicks will add up to a nice chunk of change that you’ll see leave your bank account in a heartbeat. So if you want to start with PPC, make sure that you grasp the basics first before you jumping in with both feet. Google Adwords has a great set of tutorials that will teach you the basics on this, I recommend you check it out.

Search engine optimization, or SEO is another way to get traffic to your website. This traffic though will be organic, or free. Many search engine engineers are working hard on getting organic traffic instead of going after PPC. This really works both ways: if you get high rankings in Google, your traffic will increase by default, but also if you increase your traffic, your rankings will improve automatically over time.

Here are some important ways to get organic traffic from the search engines:

• Getting links from other sites – This is important because first of all you get traffic directly from people clicking on those links pointing back to your website and also because those links will help your rankings in the SERPS
• Posting on forums and blogs – This is quite an old way to get backlinks which works great. You need to find high traffic blogs and post comments (useful comments, not spam!) on articles. The best links will come from articles with high PR (or at least the blogs to be high PR) and if possible in the same niche you are in. So if you are selling diet related products, a diet related blog will be best for your purposes. Forums work in a similar way. You join a relevant discussion and in your reply in the thread you leave your backlink with your anchor text pointing to your site.
• Submitting articles to various ezines – This means of getting traffic to your site is quite popular nowadays. Sites such as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articlebase.com are all accepting articles that have links pointing to your website (make sure though that you check out each directory’s guidelines and TOS, else your article will not be accepted) and as they are quite high PR sites, your articles there will be indexed quite fast, giving you link juice to your site right away.

There are many other ways to get links to your site to increase traffic but these are the most important ones that guarantee success if done regularly and in an ethical manner.

Internal linking in a website is extremely important in getting high ranks in the SERPS. This is actually related to the internal structure of the site rather than the incoming links. But why is this important when we are trying to focus so much on inbound links and getting visible in the search engines?

When robots from Google and other search engines come crawling your site, they need to find all the pags and all the items on the pages very fast so they can index them. If they can’t find them, the pages will never be visible in the search engines.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when working on your website, way before you start backlinking strategies:

• Deep linking – Make sure that you don’t have a very deep linking. What I mean by this is that each of your pages should be easily accessible from your index page or at least from the second page. If you find you need too many clicks to access the page, then the robots won’t find it either.  Google considers that pages that can be accessed with one click from the main page must be important so it gives those pages the importance as well. From an SEO perspective the site architecture should be as flat as possible.
• Internal linking – The pages should be linked to each other on your site. You should cross link between relevant content. For example if you are talking about dogs, and you have two main categories, one for dog barking problems and one for dog aggression, the pages within dog barking should be linked to each other with relevant keywords, but they don’t have to be interlinked with pages from dog agreession, since that is somewhat of a different subject.
• Don’t forget to use anchor text. This is not only important for inbound links but also for links within your own site. Try to avoid using too much the phrase ‘Click here’.

Don’t forget, before you work on your offsite SEO you need to take care of your onsite factors that make your website pure gold in the eyes of Google and other search engines, and proper intenal linking and internal page structure is crucial in getting there.

If you’re only starting out online with your first website and you’ve heard about pagerank but you’re not sure how to see  your own pagerank, here are a few pointers for you.

There are two aspects to Google pagerank. One is the ‘true’ pagerank that Google will never let you know (just like Coke will never release their secret recipe) and one which is months behind the true one, which you can visibly see on your Firefox taskbar, it’s called the little green bar. Please do not forget that what you see in the green bar is not the true pagerank, but nevertheless it is an indication of where you are at (or were at a few months ago).

But how can you see your pagerank, the visible one anyway?

First have a look at the screenshot below. Do you see that little green bar that I”ve highlighted with red? That is the visible pagerank.

And how can you actually see that, as Internet Explorer or Firefox doesn’t have it by default? Well, one way to do it is download the Google Toolbar. This places the PR line right away for you. All you need is hover the mouse over the green bar and the PR number will automatically display for you. This indicator is usually from 0 to 10 and for very new sites you might see an N/A (no rank yet). Of course one site where you will see the PR 10 is … Google.com.

Another option, if you don’t want to download the entire Google toolbar and you are using Mozzila Firefox is to download one of the Firefox extensions for Google PR. I won’t mention any particular one, as there are quite a few and new ones come in all the time, but if you go to the Firefox Addons, you can search for them quite easily.

But it is important to not get hand up on the toolbar, as it has been noticed that newbies tend to check their pagerank every day a couple of times You have to understand that the pagerank that is visible in the browser is only updated every 3-4 months in Google, so you can stop worrying about losing that moment when Google updates yours right now.

Google Pagerank is an interesting concept that keeps internet marketeers, webmasters and generally anyone that has a website and wants to get to the search engines first page quite busy trying to figure out. In a nutshell, pagerank is a value that shows how important a particular webpage is in Google’s eyes. Based on Google, the more other people link to a particular page, the more important that page is, and it considers it more important accordingly.

So to make it even shorter, page rank is Google’s way to determin the importance of a webpage on the net. And notice that I said ‘webpage’ and not ‘website’. The reason is because each web page has or can have a different pagerank. So if a particular domain has a pagerank (or shortly PR) of 5, this doesn’t mean that each and every page on that domain has also a PR of 5. Some might have 4, 3 or even 0, others might not have a rank at all.

The reason why this is matters is because the higher the page’s PR, the higher up it comes in the search engine results (in short called SERPS). And of course, the higher a page is in the SERPS, the more visibility it gets with the people who search for various terms on the net. And the more people see that page, the more click on it, having as a result of more visitors per that page. Makes sense?

Let’s see an example. If a person is searching for ‘best dog food’, he or she will go to Google.com (or another search engine, but now that we’re discussing Google, we’ll focus on that) and type ‘best dog food’ in the search engine. Google will return a bunch of pages (sometimes over several millions of pages) that it considers relevant for the search term. Now we know from people’s habits (just think of yourself) that one will not go through various pages to click on a website. Usually the first Google page is all that is needed to find the answer to the question, or the solution to the problem. So you see, this is why everybody is trying to get to the FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE. And PR, or pagerank is very important because the higher PR your pages have, the more change of them getting to the front of the SERPS.

And not only that, but even when you’re on the first page, you are trying to get your page as much to the top as you can. So if you’re in position 9 in Google, you might want to get to position 4, 3, 2 or even the first position. Many people click on the very first few links they see on the search results, without even bothering to click below the fold. Below the fold means having to scroll down below what is shown on your monitor. Usually that means pretty much everything below the 4th position. Makes sense?

During the next few articles we will see what all needs to be done to get our site up there to the top of the SERPS, or to the first page of Google. It’s not difficult, but as with everything else, work needs to be done.