How does PageRank work?

PageRank is the science behind where you rank in the search results. The higher your PR, the higher up in the results for a specific keyword. The lower your PR, the lower in the results. A PR is achieved by the following four factors:

• The total amount of recommendations you have (in other words, the number of relevant back links). Note: these back links must be related to your website and be relevant.
• The amount of links from high PR websites has a much bigger impact than links from low PR websites.
• Your PR is diluted by the amount of external links on your own website. In other words, if you are linking to a bunch of other websites, you are lowering your score.
• and finally, websites that have been around longer have a much bigger impact or your PR than websites that have only been around for a short period of time. It is sometimes better to have a back link from a lower PR that is aged, than a higher PR who is new to the web.

If you would like to estimate your PageRank, you can do so by using the following method. Look up the PageRank for each of your back links. Then, calculate the total point value using the table below:

PR1 = 8 points

PR2 = 64 points

PR3 = 512 points

PR4 = 4096 points

PR5 = 32768 points

PR6 = 262144 points

PR7 = 2097152 points

PR8 = 16777216 points

PR9 = 134217728 points

PR10 = 1073741824 points

Next, take your total point value and enter it into the formula below where C(A) represents the total number of back links:

PR(pts) * 0.85 / C(A) = PR points transferred through one link

Here are a few things to consider when PR-building:

• If you are able to, start off with an older domain name. If you can purchase a website that’s been around for a while, you will rank faster.
• Extend your domain name registration for 10 years. If you know you’re going to be around for a while, let Google know.
• Add rel=”nofollow” to your anchor tag to prevent GoogleBot from following links and pages that dilute your PR.

If you would like to begin link building, check out the table below:

As you can see, it takes much more effort to achieve a higher PR simply by adding back links. It is far easier to build your PageRank if you can get the attention of high PR websites.

We have a tool in our resources section so you can see the amount of back links and how Google currently ranks your website. Click here for the PR tool.

Google Insurance is a series of methologies geared to protecting your business from frustrated customers, nasty competition, and slander via blogs, forums, and other venues that can be used to negatively impact your company’s image. It is important to perform a series of best practices to prevent a bad situation from happening. This can easily be done through regular SEO maintenance.

Consider the following doomsday scenario: You have a profitable business, several employees, large accounts, and a fairly high retention rate. While most of your customers are very satisfied, you have one client who is difficult. This client verbally abuses you, is never satisfied, and spends every waking moment making doing business with them as miserable as possible. You make a decision that it is time to let this particular client go and cut your losses.

The client decides to get revenge and writes a negative rant about you in their blog. A bad situation gets worse when Google crawls the blog, which has a better PageRank, and their blog entry ranks higher than your website. Suddenly, when your company is Googled, that blog entry ranks higher for all of your targeted keywords–including your company name.

New business comes to a complete halt and current clients decide to take their business somewhere else. You consider suing the blogger for slander, but you realize that there is no use. You have no choice but to restructure under a different name and start over.

Although you may not hear about it often, this situation happens every day to companies who fail to take the proper precautions to ensure their website is optimized for the search engines. Proper SEO could have prevented this bad situation from becoming a corporation killer.

Here is a list of things every company should be doing:

• Make sure your PageRank is not “0″. That PageRank is reserved for websites that are new and have not been ranked yet. Sometimes, a “0″ ranking is a result of being delisted from Google because of blackhat SEO.
• Check to see who is linking to you and who you are linking to. Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” in the search query to see what your backlinks are. You should have backlinks with high PageRanks, this will ensure that your PageRank is high and your website is healthy.
• Consider hiring an Internet Marketing firm to manage all aspects of your website’s health.

SEO is not just a method of bringing traffic to our website, it is also a safety mechanism. It is important to understand that in this economy, many companies are getting nastier and many are investing in Internet Marketing firms to enlarge the gap between them and their competition.

We have just launched a new tool (still in beta) that allows you to see specific information about your domain, including: PageRank, Alexa Rating, the number of backlinks, and the number of search results on MSN and Yahoo.

We hope you enjoy the tool and please, share with your friends:

http://www.solarswift.com/tools/

Steps to getting quality traffic to your website:

1. Before developing your website, make sure it exists in a quality niche that is both competitive (but not too competitive) and profitable. Do keyword research to see what people are searching for and try to solve their problems. A good friend once told me that in this world, there are two ways to make it in business: (1) by giving and (2) by taking. I encourage you to make your money using method number one. You’ll find a sense of pride and comfort when building your online business.
2. Create a very high quality design that is optimized for SEO, keeps people wanting more, and drives visitors to return. To find this “design”, simply find a website that you admire who is doing very well and mimic the layout. Replace their graphics for your graphics, make this your own design. Work with a web designer (to hire me, just click the contact form) to get your ideas together in Photoshop and get the ball rolling.
3. Layout your design into individual web pages. Make sure every image has an ALT tag, make sure every page is keyword dense, make sure that every <A href=”"> body fits in with relevant keywords. Never include a hyper link that says “click here”. Make sure every page is filled with TITLE tags, META tags, and that you’re utilizing valid XHTML in your code. Make sure that you’re Section 508 compliant as well. Avoid using the TABLE tag if you can accomplish the same thing using simple XHTML tags and CSS.
4. Begin to write content for all of your pages. Make sure you have a page for free resources that will help you get organic traffic from the search engines. Hire a copywriter to write keyword dense articles for you. You need at least 20 to see an impact on your traffic. Make sure these articles are answering the questions that web surfers are asking the search engines. Lay all of your articles out on your pages and remember to continue adding articles at least weekly to keep the traffic coming in.
5. Start an Article Marketing campaign. Write an article that isn’t on your website and begin to distribute that article to article directories. Try Article Submitter for a great application that does it for free. Submit only to article sites that have good PageRanks. Sometimes it might be a good idea to “spin” your articles prevent getting held up in Google’s duplicate content penalty. Write a few articles if necessary and submit them on different iterations to remaining directories.
6. Create a squeeze page on your site where you’re trying to sell your product. Make sure that the squeeze page is making conversions from your current SEO campaign. Once you find a good conversion rate…
7. Start a Google AdWords campaign and begin to direct traffic to that squeeze page that has a good conversion rate. At this point, it’s a matter of spending money to make money–fueling a money making machine.
8. Begin to promote that same squeeze page on as many advertising services as possible. Consider starting a Site Targeted Campaign on as many relevant website as possible.
9. And finally, rake in the dough!

This is my “formula” and it works every time for me. Keep in mind, I didn’t include time periods in this because the amount of time you should spend on each step is contingent upon Google’s time to crawl your website, the time for you get a PageRank, and the time it takes for you to complete your tasks (like writing articles, designing website, optimization, etc.) I recommend that if you’re interested in marketing your product or service, begin optimizing your website for SEO. For the most part, SEO is completely free and sometimes has better conversion rates than PPC. Start your PPC campaign when you know the results are coming in and that your converting traffic.

• Google can recognize an affiliate link when they see one. It’s a simple algorithm really, if Google crawls a hyper link that forwards to another hyper link, it can easily assume that the link is an affiliate link and it will either lower your Quality Score (if promoting through Google AdWords) or lower your PageRank (if promoting through SEO).
• People are getting smarter and they notice when they see *.*.clickbank.net…or if they see a hyper link with a number next to it, they’re getting sent to a website that is trying to sell them something.
• If you’re promoting your website through e-mail marketing, SPAM filters are getting smarter every day and if one affiliate screws up, it ruins it for everyone trying to use similar hyper links from the same domain.

Here are a few methods to solve this problem:

The META Refresh Method

This method basically instructs your web browser to automatically refresh the web page after a given time interval–in this case 0 seconds. Simply create a web page, something like “RegistryMechanic.html” and place this in the HEAD section of the web page page:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com" />

After you’ve created that page, you simply need to place a hyper link to “amazingdesignsecrets.html”. But WAIT, there is an extra step that most webmasters forget to do, you need to add rel=”nofollow” to your tag. Here is an example of how it should look:

<a href="amazingdesignsecrets.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Amazing Design Secrets</a>

The reason you need to add NOFOLLOW to your REL element is because Google will still craw your redirect and detect an affiliate link. You need to tell GOOGLEBOT to not craw that hyper link.

The Server Redirect Method

This method is a bit more advanced, but is probably the most effective in my opinion. To create a redirect on the server, simple create a dynamic web page in whatever language your server supports (ASP, PHP, etc.) and create the redirect in the code. Here is an example of a PHP redirect:

<?php
header( 'Location: http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com' ) ;
?>

Here is an example of a ASP Redirect

<%
Response.Redirect "http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com"
%>

Here is an example of a JSP redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

Here is an example of a CGI/Perl Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com");


The HTACCESS 301 Method

If you have an Apache server, you have the option to have a 301 redirect in your HTACCESS file. You need to edit your HTACCESS file and add the following:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^amazingdesignsecrets.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Here is a technique I use when trading links with a relevant website. Please do not use this technique to spam, that will do you no good in the long run. If you can find relevant Blogs that are very closely related to your website, I recommend finding a blog entry that has a high PageRank. I recommend reading the entire article and leaving a nice, detailed comment that is clearly helpful and part of the discussion. Right below your comment, add a small link to your website. Many blogs have a place for you to add your URL to your comment. Assuming your not spamming, the author of the blog entry will not flag your comment as spam. Here is a technique to finding high quality blogs that are related to your website:

Type this into Google:
inurl: “blog” “post a comment” -”comments closed” “YOUR KEYWORDS”

EDU Websites

If you can get a back link from an EDU website, it will help your PageRank tremendously. If you are currently in college, you should be able to gain access to your schools web server. If you can find friends that have EDU websites that are relevant to yours, ask them to trade links with you, it will certainly help you. Here is a technique for finding EDU blogs on the web to comment on:

Type this into Google
site:.edu inurl: “blog” “post a comment” -”comments closed” “YOUR KEYWORDS”

Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are another excellent way to increase your search engine ranking, assuming you’re exchanging quality links of course. The concept is simple-all of the websites within the link exchange have a Links page on their website and that page contains links to other websites they have traded with. You need to be made aware of something very important though. Google will penalize you for having a Links page with over 50 websites automatically. By having over 50 external links on one page, Google will actually decrease the value of the links you are trading. To prevent this, it is recommended to only trade links with websites that have high PageRank and not participate in over 50 link exchanges.

• Link Metro is a wonderful link exchange service. Website A chooses to exchange links with Website B. Website A places Website B’s link on the website’s link page. Website B can choose to accept or decline the exchange. If Website A accepts the exchange, Website B is given the Website A’s link and description. If Website A declines, Website B is notified to remove the URL.

Social Networking

Social networking sites are growing very quickly. I’m not referring to MySpace and FaceBook, who are famous for bringing people together, but I’m actually referring to business-to-business and business-to-customer networking.
Here are a few websites you should invest your time in:

• 43 Things – allows you to tag certain “things” and promote what people want to do. So if someone wants to learn web design, you can type “learn web design” and see who is in that category and add comments and a link to your course-without spamming of course.
• Squidoo – allows you to create “lenses” for specific topics to promote and advertise your products. Squidoo pages are optimized for search engines can have a very high PageRank.

Create a Blog

If you are promoting your own product, nothing improves your traffic more than adding a blog to your website and constantly updating it. Blogs are very search engine friendly and will help you increase your PageRank at record time. A relevant blog can help you achieve the results you’re looking for much faster than a boring sales page. Here are a few things you can do to get results:

• Put together a canned list of blog entries. If you’re product is on web design, write 20 web design entries and post one entry per day.
• Change the dates of your blog entries so they appear as if they’ve existed for a longer period of time, but continue to update the blog every day with relevant keywords and articles.
• Seed your Blog with relevant comments (even if they’re not your own). Make those comments look like someone else wrote them and even write a few negative comments. This will make your blog appear as if it’s popular and the search engines will reward you for it.
• Power up your blog posts with social networking sites: Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Yahoo! My Web.Articles

Articles 

Create a free article section for your website and feature several keyword related articles for your potential customers to read. Not only will they be impressed with the free information, search engines will rank your individual article pages and increase traffic to your website. This will also prevent pay per click (PPC) advertisers (such as Google AdWords) from potentially marking your website as spam.

You can make money by having well written articles on your website as well. You can embed Affiliate links into your content and you can place Google AdSense advertisements throughout the copy of your article. Just because you’re offering the information for free doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to monetize it-just remember not to go too far.

Check out the table below, it does a wonderful job at showing how many links you will need to attain a high ranking. Say we have a website that has a PageRank of 1. In order to gain a PageRank of 3, you will need to trade 555 links from websites that have a PageRank of 3 and fewer than 50 external links to achieve that new PageRank. Sounds difficult, doesn’t it? Not really! The Yahoo! Directory and the DMOZ directory usually both have extremely high a PageRank’s. If you can simply get an internal link from a website that has a PageRank of 5, achieving a PageRank of 3 only requires that one person to link to you!

In theory, you can back link your way into a PageRank of 8 (from a PageRank of 1) by having 2,795,522 websites link to you, but it’s important to realize that if you practice this scheme (which Google considers link farming), you will get banned from the search engines.

If your website has a PageRank 0, there may be a problem that you should investigate. Google gives this PageRank as a penalty for websites that are promoted by unethical and illegal means, including link farming. If you have just registered a domain, don’t fret—Google automatically registers a Page Rank of 0 for newly registered domain names.

Other things to boost your PageRank:

• Purchase an older domain name. Statistics show that those who purchase old domain names rank better (and faster) in Google. I have personally seen this and it does help.
• When you purchase your domain, don’t purchase it for just one year. Statistics also show that websites that are registered for 10 years instead of 1 perform better in Google and other search engines. This is because search engines assume relevancy for websites that “are going to be around for a while”.
• If you have a link that you do not want crawled for purposes of PageRank, add rel=”nofollow” to your anchor tag (<a href=”#” rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>).
• If you have text within a web page that you don’t want the search engine to craw, you can avoid the problem by converting your text into an image. The bots that crawl websites are unable to crawl images for text, so by placing the text into an image in Adobe Photoshop can save you from loosing your positions in the search engines.