Increasing Your Website’s PageRank
http://www.sph.umich.edu/computing/web/search_engines.html
With the introduction of the Internet into the modern world, organizations across the globe have another important factor to consider in order to help the success of their company: their website’s PageRank. Of course every organization wants to be one of the first links to appear when a search keyword related to the organization is entered on any relevant search engine. In our class we discussed the different ways page rank is calculated for a given site given a search and a listing of Hubs and Authorities connected to that site. However PageRank becomes quite interesting when approaching from the other side, how to increase a particular site’s PageRank for given search items.
In the context of our class, the most important determining factor of PageRank was the number and popularity of websites leading into another website. For a given authority, both the number of hubs leading into the authority and the respective “popularity” of each of these hubs were the two determinants of the authority’s PageRank. This article agrees with this logic by also stating that the number and popularity of sites linking to your site is the most important determinant of Google’s PageRank.
One strategy the article mentioned to improve PageRank stems directly from this concept of number and popularity of pages leading into a site. On Google you can easily find related sites to your own site by typing in “related: mywebsite.com”. Searching for keywords related to your site is another good thing to do. After finding a list of related sites, find the sites especially popular or relevant and contact the webmaster asking to add a link on their site to yours. Exchanging a link for a link is usually particularly successful, as it will increase both related pages’ PageRank. In addition, tapping into the millions of users today on social media like Facebook or Twitter can greatly increase your PageRank. The more people talking about and sharing your link on social media, the higher your page rank will get. These social media sites are also very popular, so a link to your site from a very popular site like Facebook will have a bigger impact on your page rank then a less popular site might. All of these methods will help greatly in increasing PageRank in terms of popularity and number of hubs linking to an authority.
While links to a page is certainly a major factor in determining PageRank, the article does mention other important things to consider about a site that could also increase PageRank. For example, if you think about what the Search results look like for a particular query on Google, the link to the site is not the only thing listed. The title, link, and the first 2-3 sentences that appear on the site are all listed, which means the name of your website’s Title and the first paragraph of information on your site are also very important. In addition to affecting how the search engine will rank your page, the title and description of your site can also affect the probability that someone will actually physically click on the link, which in the end is the most important thing. Going off of wanting a human to eventually physically click on your site’s link, having a URL that is readable to the Human-Eye and packed with keywords related to the site is also key.
These are just some of many tactics that can be implemented to increase a site’s page rank. There are definitely a lot of moving pieces that can be hard to keep track of, which explains why the field of “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” exists in today’s society.