Casting Light on the Mystery of Google's Pagerank

We have dertermined that the following steps and processes are all good elements that will allow the googlebot to enjoy reading your site, and as such rank it within the pagerank system as a decent site.

Generate a google sitemap to ensure all pages on your site are properly indexed so the search engine can read and reference every single page on your site that is publicly accessible.

Meta description and meta keywords that are both relevant and appropriate. Use no more than 3 repeats of any keyword in these tags, and we keep to a maximum of 200 characters total for our keywords and descriptions.

Content, content, content. Always keep new and fresh content on the front page and in the site. We use a rotating php script that changes our site's feature, which is the current Primetime TV schedule to show that night's showing along with their fantasy game stock values. That TV schedule changes every day and is updated weekly with new schedules. so the search engine spiders always see something different every day they visit. This cannot be stressed enough. Find a way to have unique content on your site's main indexing pages so the spiders always find fresh information every time they visit. That is an almost guarantee of good indexing.

Quality inbound links. An inbound link is a link from another site to your main page or to a specific public page on your site. We use article writing from AssociatedContrent, some other sources such as Helium, plus we have gotten an appropriate listing on Wikipedia. It is very hard to write an article for the grand wiki that is not self-promoting - but through a lot of research we found out how, and now have a permanent link on the granddaddy of all reference sites.

Quality outbound links. This is almost more important than the inbound links. One of the worst things a site can do is achieve a pagerank, then sell it's PR to other sites as a link farm. Pagerank works both ways - if you link to a lot of sites with good pagerank your site will gain a stronger ranking. Link to a lot of sites with no PR - your site will drop fast. Link to sites with a much higher PR - your site will rise as well.

How does PageRank actually work? The formula for PageRank from the original Google whitepaper is something like this ...

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Broken down into real english - each page that links to your page, or that your page links to, divided by the sum total of those site's PR, is added to your site's PR to come up to a new total which is adjusted by the 'd' factor. Nominally, that is set to 0.85. What that means is, you link your PR 1 site to 5 other PR 1 sites, you'll have a PR of 1. Because the links in and out are the same. Now, you link your site to a whole slew of other sites with various PR's and you have good inbound links, your PR will rise.

We succeeded by doing the following:

Writing quality articles and submittign them to the major article directories. Where possible, we put our sitelink as a bylinwe. In other cases, we put the sitelink where we were permitted to do so and submitted lots of articles.
Submitting and then resubmitting our site to the major search engines on a regular basis. Yes, it only takes one submission to register. Sending the site multiple times gives the engine a chance to respider the site and better help the rankings on the engine.
We also linked only to real sites that dealt with our subject, we have links to all the major TV studios and networks, but not to review sites or gossip sites. We also have a couple of links to reciprocal directories to enable us to remain on their listings. By being choosy about who you link to, you will gain pagerank and your sites will climb in both popularity and recognition. Ouir techniques have now put us at the top of all the major engines within our keyword brackets. Not bad for a couple of amateurs who know nothing about Web marketing.

Pagerank is not as heard as it appears as long as you put the effort into it. Build quality links to decent sites, write articles or have them written for you, and above all else, enjoy yourself.