If you have a website or blog, you eventually want people to visit your site. Otherwise, what is the purpose of writing posts and articles if people aren't stopping by to read them right? Additionally, if you are trying to generate revenue from your site, traffic is an important part of the equation. If people aren't coming to your site, they won't visit your advertisers, and in turn your advertisers won't pay you. That's not hard to figure out. In the early part of your blog or website's life, a lot of your traffic will come from direct promotion, such as forum posts, emails, social networking sites, etc. Eventually, as your site builds more content, your traffic will shift from direct traffic to web search traffic. If you are going to drive traffic to your site, you will need to increase your Page Rank. Before we discuss ways to increase your page rank, let's first briefly discuss what page rank is.
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. Specifically, Google uses links from other websites to determine what your page rank is. This is done through the algorithm which balances your back links compared to other back links of websites of a similar type. Google assigns a number (or rank) to each website which ranges from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Your goal is to increase the number over time to achieve a higher page rank.
Now that you have a brief (that was a very brief) understanding of what page rank is, let's discuss some ways to increase your page rank. These methods are in no particular order, but you should utilize each method in conjunction with the rest. No one method works alone, you must try to use them all together. The methods below will be explained briefly in this post. I may provide more elaborate explanations in other posts.
1. Forum Posts - This is pretty simple in concept. Find forums that are similar to your search topic, create accounts and make posts. Most forums will allow you to add a link to your website or blog in your signature. Be mindful here. Some sites have rules that prohibit spam. If you disobey the rules, you could get your account deleted and all your links (and hard work) will be erased. The correct way to do this is to also visit other peoples posts, read them and respond. Eventually you will create relationships and friendships with these people and they will support you. Here is a great link to a website where you can find forums specific to your topic Forums List
2. Search Engine Directory Submission - Submit your website to all the major search engines. The best way to do this is manually, although this will take a great deal of time. There are some sites that will do this for you for either free, or a fee. A site like Submit Express will submit your site to about 20 search engines for free, and an additional 300 or so for a small fee.
3. Social Networking Sites - Sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Myspace are all the rage on the Internet today. In fact those 4 sites account for approximately 45% of all the web traffic over the last week. Creating accounts, making friends and building links through those sites is a great way to increase your traffic.
4. Link Directories - Link Directories are another quick way to build backlinks to your site. Many of them require a reciprocial link from you to their site, but others do not. Here is a great list of a couple hundred different link directories to submit to Link Directories. TIP: Create a Site Description and save it in a TXT file, so that you can copy and paste it to each directory you submit to. Most of them have the same format.
5. Visit Similar Sites or Blogs - Do a web search for similar sites or blogs to yours. Some of them may be forums, others might just be blogs just like your own. Check them out, if you like them, post a link to them on your site. Your readers may like them as well. Then contact them and let them know that you like them and have linked to them. Most of them will appreciate it and probably link back.
6. Ezine Articles - Ezine Articles are a great way to get people to visit your site. Once you have developed some decent content, submit a few articles to Ezine Articles After they approve your article, they will create a back link to your site for each article you submit. If you find a topic that is getting a lot of traffic to your site, you may want to write a few more articles along those lines. If you have a diverse blog, you may want to submit articles of different topics within your scope. For instance if your blog is about Cars, you may want to submit 1 article on engines, another one on hybrids, another one on the best miles per gallon, and another one on Nascar (assuming you have already written posts along those lines.)
7. Google Adwords - Now, I don't know for sure that Google Adwords links counts towards page rank, but it will definitely bring more traffic to your site. As the traffic comes, so will people that will revisit your site, and even willingly link to it. So in a round about way, this will help your PR, even if the adwords link does not. I will eventually write another post about Adwords, because it is a gamble. You need to becareful of how much you invest and how much you stand to gain. This is best for sites that sell a product or service, and not just a standard blog.
8. Email Signature - An email signature won't count directly to your page rank either, but it will directly bring traffic to your site and thus indirectly effect your page rank.
9. Submit To Google - This is a fairly obvious one, but if you have to submit your site to Google, so that it is indexed and eventually ranked within Google. There are some key things you have to do with this. Signing up for Google Webmaster Tools helps a lot. They will analyze your site and let you know what changes you need to make in order to achieve the best rank. Some things you need to do is include a Site Map and a robots.txt file. I will discuss these in another post, for now you just need to know that they exist and you must do this to achieve PR.
10. Link Exchange Forums/Sites - There are plenty of sites you can sign up for that will be centered around link exchanges. Some sites like Submit Express have forums where you can search for exchanges with similar minded sites. Another site I use sparringly is Link Market.net With them, you will get plenty of link requests each day simply by submitting. I do not suggest you link to each site that requests you. Check the other sites PR first. If the site either has a high PR or is along the same topic as yours, it is worth exchanging a link.
Bonus: Create Internal Links - This is one that I don't do often enough. If someone likes the article they just read, they may want to know if you have a similar article on your same site. You can help them out by placing a link at the bottom of your article. If they like it, they may click to the next one, and will thus stay on your site longer, and possibly revisit, or even link to you. Here's an example of a post that I created which discusses a couple methods of link swapping and has a nifty PR checking tool: Link Swapping and PR Checking Tool
If you found this post helpful, please feel free to link to my site, read other posts, or make any comments below. Thanks.
Dan
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