The question of when Google updates the pagerank next is an ongoing one in the webmaster and SEO world.  This question comes up over and over again in each webmaster forum, in each internet marketing forum and any online forum that somehow deals with websites. So when is the next pagerank update anyway?

One of the answer is: all the time. And the other: you never really know.

How so? Well, the true pagerank is updated by Google in real time. After 3-4 months Google updates its green bar at the bottom of your browser. However, as we mentioned before, this is not a real pagerank. It is more an indication of where your site is  on the Google scale. However in real time, by now you might have 1-2 higher rankings than what your green bar shows you, or even lower, depending on how much you might have neglected your site recently. So you see, it’s really a question that noone can truly answer but Google, and they won’t. But if you are really curious, just enter in the Google search engine ‘Google update history’ and you should come up with the history of the updates so far. This way you can predict when a possible next update will be.

One of the best tips I’ve read over and over again is to not really focus on pagerank that much. Just make sure that your site is constantly updated with great content, that you are all the time busy getting relevant backlinks to your site and that your onsite (or onpage) SEO is done properly. Then the rest will take care of itself in due course.

Oh and by the way, the latest Google pagerank update (the green bar that is) was today

A recent study has been conducted by SEOMoz  leading SEO experts have been invited to determine what they thought were the most important factors in achieving high rankings.  SEO experts have been invited from US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and some others.

Over 100 different ranking factors had to be evaluated by each participant, and the final results showed an interesting picture. The top 9 results were as follows:

• using keywords in the title tag
• relevant anchor text in inbound links
• global link authority of the site
• age of the site
• link popularity within the internal structure of the site
• the relevance of the inbound links
• link popularity of the site in the relevant niche
• keyword used in the text of the body
• general link popularity of the sites that link to the page

It seems that the most important facts that everyone agreed with was using the keyword in the title tag. We do know that this is important and having the major SEO guys also agree with this just reinforces all that we’ve already learned. Another important aspect is also the fact that the older the site, the better the ranking. So all things equal, a site 2 years old will rank better than a new registered site.

Another thing that is quite important, as we can see from the bullets above, is how relevant the sites linking to us are. Links coming from sites totally unrelated to the niche we are in still count, however if we can get some nice inbound links from the same type of sites will help us greatly in achieving high rankings. For example, if we’re in the acne niche and we are getting some great backlinks from some acne forums, that will count more than links from a Hollywood information blog).

So it is important to always keep these 9 points in mind when a new site is about to be setup, from purchasing or registering the domain to adding correct title tags right down to trying to get backlinks from relevant sites with proper anchor tags. All this will help in making sure that our site will shoot up in the rankings leaving other less SEO’d sites behind.

Since we are concentrating on Google as our primary search engine, most of these tips will be relevant to Google. However, this doesn’t mean that other search engines, such as Altavista, Yahoo or Bing (former MSN) won’t index your site. As a matter of fact, many of the tweaks that you do to your page (on or offline SEO) will improve your ranking with all of these search engines.

Once you created your website, added a few relevant pages and performed various onsite optimization techniques, you want your site to get indexed in Google, and that fast. The faster your site is indexed, the faster your chance to start climbing up the ranks. So here a few tips that will help your site get indexed in Google sometimes as soon as in 24 hours.

• Submit your site to Google (free) – You can submit your website to Google for free, and you only need to submit the main site for the Google bots to come visit and start crawling all the pages on your site. Click here to submit your site
• If you don’t have yet one, create a Google Webmaster Tools account. Once you do that, you need to submit your sitemap to Google (on that page there is plenty of help and information straight from Google on how to create and submit a sitemap). Also you need to validate your site first, so Google knows that the site is yours. Very easy to do, again just read up on it at Google Webmaster Tools and create your free account now.
• One thing I”ve personally noticed to help with fast indexing with Google is to social bookmark your site, particular at Digg and at Propeller. Spotback also works, but these two are known for having the Google bots practically sleeping at their doorsteps. If you don’t have an account with them (it’s free) go now and sign up to Digg and Propeller. You won’t be sorry.
• Ping your post or article. Each time you write a new article, make sure to ping it. Pinging means notifying various websites that  you have new content. Many of these pinging services actually notify Google blogs of it and you should make sure to use this opportunity all the time. Note: WordPress blogs are automatically pinged every time you post a blog. Here are some sites where you can ping your articles: Pingler, Pingmyblog and IPings.

By using any or all of these quick techniques you have a greater chance of Google indexing each of your pages extremely fast.

We know by now that Google ranks the pages based on the number and the quality of links coming to that page. If your site has 150 incoming links, and a competitor’s site has 25 links, your site will be ranked higher. However, it is also important that the links are quality links. So what do we mean by that?

Well, I’m sure you’ve all heard of ‘link farms’, which are nothing but some quickly thrown together free blogs with crappy content that you can add your links to your website. These ‘parasite’ sites will never rank high in the search engines, particularly that many of them have either duplicate content, or they are something called ‘autoblogs’. Autoblogs means that the content is scrapped from other blogs. But more on that later.

So the equation will change if let’s say 100 of those 150 to your sites come from cheap link farms, while the 25 links going to your competitor’s site are quality links from high page rank sites. So you really need to keep both of these factors in mind when you want to improve your SERPS ranking and increase your PR with Google.

So here are a few tips to improve your rankings:

1. Get many quality imbound links to your site. And not only to your site, but to the various pages of your site. Remember that each page on your website can and will have a different page rank with Google as well as a different position in the SERPS
2. Make sure your Title Tag is properly optimized on each of your webpages. Title tag is what goes between HTML <TITLE> tags in the <HEAD> on your page.
3. Make sure that the keyword density is ‘just right’ for your site. There are SEO specialists who say anything between 1.5-3% is perfect, while others go as high as 5-6%. What I suggest is that you should have your keywords once in your first paragraph, possibly towards the beginning of it, once or twice in the middle of your article, and once towards the end, in your closing paragraph. The most important thing is to sound natural to the reason, without ‘stuffing’ your keywords all over the place in the article for ‘Google love’. Don’t forget, you want to attrack readers, not only bots, since the readers will make you that money, the bots won’t.
4. If you use images on your site, don’t forget to optimize them as well. By this I mean using the ALT tag for your images. Apparently Google indexes the text that are in the ALT tag of your images, so you should not waste any legit opportunity to get that opportunity for higher ranking in the search engines