Welcome to lesson 6 to blogging.  

This lesson I will be focusing on what Google Page Rank (PR) is all about, how important it is and what are the tips to increase PR.  

Before we even go into this topic, I would like to clarify that PR in this case does not mean Public Relations but instead stands for Page Rank. With this, we shall head right into lesson 6. 

 

What Is PR?

 

PR is a numerical value given by Google to determine how important the page is. The numeric value is ranked from 0 to 10 with 0 being the least important and 10 being the most important. PR is being updated about 4 times a year and each interval is estimated to be around 3 months. 

The way Google determines the PR of a page is through how many websites are linking to it. Links to a website are seen by Google as a vote for it. However, inbound links have different weightage on a website. For example, a link from a “PR7” site weigh more compared to a link from a “PR4” site. Therefore, you can get 1000 “PR1” linking to your blog but another blog with 100 “PR5” links can easily outrank you due to the higher quality links that they have.  

 

PR Can Be Penalized

 

There are several mistakes that I want my readers to avoid so that your PR will not be penalized unnecessarily. If you are currently doing the following action, my advice is to stop and remove it from your blog.  

 

1) Linking to a “link farm”

A “link farm” is a website that does link exchanges with many other sites irregardless of whether they are of common niche topic. You should have known that inbound links will help to increase your PR and some websites are massively promoting link exchanges for the effort of purely increasing PR. Mutual links between websites are also known as “reciprocal links”.

However, these are the sites that you should avoid exchanging links with because Google will penalize them. If you had links with similar websites like this, remove it now before you get penalized as well. Be very careful and clear of the sites before linking to them to avoid falling into this category.  

If the link is a 1-way inbound link, then you do not have to worry because even if it was a “link farm, you will not be penalized since we cannot control sites that want to link to us.  

 

2) Avoid selling DoFollow links

You may not understand what does DoFollow links mean at this point of time but the general advice is not to sell any text links. There are sites that want to increase their PR by simply paying a higher PR sites to place their links on it. Google goes down very hard on such cases. It is said that Google will not penalized links that are NoFollow but no one knows how true this is. 

 

Importance Of PR

 

Some people use PR to make money by selling text links and writing sponsored reviews. Selling text links means having other websites to put their URL link on your blog for a fee. Sponsored review means writing review (normally positive review since this is being paid) for a particular product, service or website for a fee. To me, there are other benefits to leverage from PR.  

 

1) More comments

Commenting is a way to build links back to a blog. Therefore, when your blog has a PR, there will be more people commenting on your articles. More comments on a blog will have a very good “social proof” to your readers that there are actually a handful of people reading your blog everyday. “Social proof” is a very powerful tool in which I will discussed indepth in the later part of blog coaching.  

 

2) Improve search ranking

Google PR is one of the factors that are calculated in how high your website will rank for a particular keyword. Therefore, higher PR does not mean that the site will be top in search ranking because there are other factors that need to be considered.  

 

Tips To Increase Page Rank

 

1) Inbound links from higher PR sites

This does not come overnight and takes a lot of effort to achieve this. You need to have excellent content in which other blogs don’t provide and contact the more established blogger of your niche about the content that you have. It takes consistent effort to build relationship with other bloggers before they will even look at your articles.  

 

2) Frequent and quality content

Apart from producing content regularly, the quality of it must be there. Quality content increases the chance of other blogs linking to your article. You can also inject humour into your articles to make it more interesting for people to read and thus making your content unique and reader friendly.  

 

3) Participating in forums

You can create a signature on forums which will appear at the end of your every forum post. This signature should include a link back to your blog. Choose a fairly popular forum and contribute actively to get not only a link back but also traffic.  

 

4) Submitting articles to social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. are sites where you submit your articles and build backlinks from it. This will also create some traffic in return if you know the techniques to do it. This will also be covered at the later part of my coaching blog.  

 

5) Article Marketing

This is similar to submitting to social bookmarking sites. You can choose to write articles and submit it to article directories like EzineArticles, ArticleLand and ArticleDashboard. You can include a resource box at the end of your article with your blog link and this creates a backlink.  

 

6) Internal Linking

You can link be to your other articles as well to get backlinks. For example, you have article A & B posted on your blog. Article A has a PR4 and article B has PR0. Since article A and B are relevant, you create a link back to article B which resulted in an internally create backlink for your article B. Internal linking also improves your SEOs and the number of page views by your visitors. 

 

7) Commenting on DoFollow blogs

Not to worry if you don’t know what are DoFollow blogs. For now, there is a list of DoFollow blogs compiled by ThouShallBlog. Use the list and choose about 5-6 blogs to comment on. Make constructive comments and at the same time foster a relationship with the bloggers.  

 

8 ) Writing guest posts

This basically means writing an article for another blog. When you write an article for another blog, you can create a link back to your blog as well. However, do select blogs of your related niche to do guest blogging.  

 

Tools Used To Check PR

These are the list of tools that you can use to check your PR. It also includes SEOs tools which I will explain more in the future.

 

1) SEOmoz

2) LinkVendor

3) SEO Chat

4) SEO TOOLS

5) iWEBTool 

 

Tools Installed On Browser

These are the tools that can be installed on your browser to check the PR of every page that you go to. I personally used the Search Status plug in as it is the most neat and does not take up additional slot on my browser. Download and test it for yourself. 

 

1) Google Toolbar – Internet Explorer

2) Search Status - FireFox 

 

You should have a general idea on what Google PR is and in what way is it important. If I am not wrong, the next Google PR update should be within this 1 month. Therefore, work on the tips that I provide you to improve your PR.

 

Tasks for lesson 6

1) Participate in at least one forums of your niche and contribute to discussions that you have inputs only.

2) Comment on 5 regular blogs and build relationship with blogger.

3) Write one guest posts.

4) Meddle with the SEO tools and browser tools if you have additional time. 

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Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com