How to promote your website - Part 3 - How page rank works

[temi]

This is my explanation of how page rank works

Every page on the web has a score set between 0 to 10 with 10 being the best and 0 being the worst. So how is this score calculated? Not a very simple answer but here goes. The web is made up of a mass of links. Pages link to other pages and sites link to other sites. It is this massive web of link that makes the internet work the way it does. What Google does is to class a link from site A to site B as a vote for site B from site A. Google will then take into account the page rank of the site that cast the vote and pass on some of this value to the page that received the link. In effect you are passing page rank from one page to another with each and every link. The higher the page rank of the site that votes the more page rank will be passed on. Every sites page rank is updated each month to reflect it's new value when the Google search engine updates.


So what does page rank do? Page rank is one of the many factors that are take into account when working out the ranking order for the search results. A very simple example would be 2 sites that are exactly the same content and layout and about the same subject (totally cloned sites) each site is about "broken bottles". The only difference is that one site has a page rank 3 the other has a page rank 7. If a user to Google or any of it's partners was to carry out a search for "broken bottles" they would see the site with the highest page rank, rank higher within the results page. This example is a very simple demonstration about how page rank works. What you need to keep in mind is that page rank is only part of the equation. There are several other factors taken into consideration such as keyword density, source of inbound links ect.


How what you need to do is work to increase your page rank by attracting links from sites that are similar to your own. Remember a link to your site is a vote for your site. As I mentioned before some page rank value is passed with every link. More value is passed if the link to you is from a site that on a similar topic. General links do help, although on topic links help out a lot more.

You must also remember that the purpose of a link is not all about page rank. A link is a link and the main reason for them being there is for users to come and visit your site. Because of the way page rank has become such a dominating force on the web a the majority of webmasters only think of links as page rank givers. If I was you I would call a spade a spade and work on building good link popularity and let the page rank just happen happen. A lot of people are starting to think of page rank as "ego rank". I think this is possibly the case.


As you build up links over time you will begin to see your page rank starting to increase. This is a sign that you are moving in the right direction. Now I will try to offer some advice on linking rules and things to try and avoid. I will also make some suggestions on how to manage your page rank within your site.


When you have page rank within your site this becomes a valuable asset. You can link to other sites or keep the page rank within your own pages. Even if you choose to retain all the page rank within your site you should still use sensible linking methods to ensure more page rank is distributed to your important pages than your minor pages. If you choose to link to other sites they you need to be very careful who you link to. The safest thing to do in this situation is link to no more than three sites from each page on your site. It is also good if these pages are the definitive sources of information on your page topic. You should be really careful to avoid linking to sites that appear to be bearing a penalty from a search engine. Linking to a "bad neighborhood" could eventually lead to your own page receiving a penalty. A website that occurs a penalty from Google might as well shut up shop. It really is that bad so be very careful who you link to.


So how do I get links? The most effective method of attracting inbound links is to build as much content as possible on your site. This will make other sites likely to link to you. In the web content is king. For example if you where building a site to sell mobile phones you might want to add information as well as the sales core of your site. This information might be reviews of the latest mobile phones and detailed history of mobile technologies. This will increase your scope for keyword searches and will make other sites more likely to link to you if they find your articles useful. I always like to make it easy for people to link to my sites. One method of doing this is to have a link on your pages "link to us" if a user clicks on this it will take them to a page where they can choose an image or text and the page will display the HTML code they will need to add to their pages in order to display a link to you. This method is fairly slow but costs nothing and used no effort on your part after you set the pages and banners up. In the case of text link this method will let you set your anchor text that is used within the link. Anchor text is the term used to describe the words that are highlighted within any link. Anchor text is also an important factor when Google decides how much page rank is will pass from one page to another when a link occurs.