As a website owner, I have always had the Google toolbar installed so that I could watch my page ranks and compare them to other sites. But I’ve never been overly concerned about it. Now that I am also a blogger, it appears that I should be paying more attention.
I’m going to start really basic for those of you who don’t know Google PageRank (PR) at all. Without getting into a lot details, essentially Google has a magic formula that decides how important everything on the internet is or is not. At least in Google’s opinion. Some would argue that you should not care about Google’s opinion. Others would argue that if you don’t cater to Google, you won’t make any money.
If you are of the thought that you need Google to like you in order for you to make money (or at least that it doesn’t hurt if Google likes you) and you want to get Google to give you a higher PR, you then search far and wide to figure out how to accomplish that. Here are my tips in a nutshell:
- Have good content. It is the most important factor. The more original, creative content that you have on your site, the more that Google will like you.
- Make other people want to link to you. You MUST have links coming from other sites to your site in order to get your PR up. And those links can’t just be links that you buy or links in crappy directories. They have to be from other sites that also have high PR and that have something in common with your pages. And you need a lot of those links.
- Pray to the Google Gods. Seriously. No one knows for sure how the whole system works, so if 1 and 2 don’t work for you, resort to 3. Or maybe send them a nice cheese and sausage basket or something.
In my next post, we will talk about ways to start getting links back to you. In the meantime, you work on your good content.
