Pagerank is a complex algorithm put forth by Google to determine the worth of your blog or website. Typically, it takes close to three months to establish any type of pagerank with Google. The key to increasing your pagerank within those three months is to keep in mind several SEO tips and tricks to make your site more valuable. Some businesses will buy a pagerank, meaning they will purchase one way links pointing towards their site. This a sure fire way to get ranked quickly, yet it can also get you banned from Google all together. You’ve seen this many times, in fact, if you’ve written paid reviews or taken money for a link to place on your site. This is the definition of buying pagerank.

Personally, I took the less expensive route and found out the easiest ways to develop a high ranking website. I approach pagerank that same way that I do when I’m setting up a new site. This is only a starting point.

• I look at the topic I will be focusing on.
•  The blog template. 
• The amount of widgets and ads I have on my site.
• The loading time of my site.
• Header and image tags.
• The amount of links I have on my home page pointing away from my blog.

Keywords

SEO and Keyword Density have been topics of conversation in the past few weeks, however this is how I approach them with my websites. When I write a post, I think about the topic I will be writing about and whether that topic has much competition. I look at keyword tools and a combination of my chosen keyword to see what the global search rate is. From there, I start adding the keywords into my text that will gain the highest amount of attention, so to speak. For example, my archaeology site is a niche type of website. I have to keep every post focused on that topic. No matter what subtopic I’m writing about, I make sure my main niche keyword “archaeology” is included in that post. Therefore, when my post does get published, Google right away will start analyzing the words, determining if my pagerank on that particular topic will gain an audience.

Linking to High Profile Sites

You can get an instant boost to your pagerank by linking to high ranked, high profile sites. Don’t expect to get linked back from a high profile site right away just because you’ve given them a link. Link to a site like National Geographic or Discovery News because you enjoy the site, not because you want something in return. Every month these sites analyze their oneway links from blogs, and in some cases, they will mention your blog or a post in a recent article because you linked to them. Sometimes they will even add your site to their blogroll, which was the case of my archaeology site. I started re-blogging interesting archaeology stories from Discovery News every month, giving them more exposure for free, and giving me more traffic because of the keyword “Discovery News”. They found value in my site and my marketing, so they added the site to their blogroll. Every time they post a new story, my blog’s URL is on that same page, giving me another backlink.

The Amount of Backlinks and One Way Links

This is where it gets interesting. According to the stats concerning my pagerank, I have more backlinks and one way links indexed in Yahoo than I do in Google. No matter which search engine your links are indexed in they all add up. This is a brief overview of the amount of links it takes to gain a pagerank with Google. As you can see from the chart, pagerank is determined by the power of the links point towards your site. Imagine, it only takes one pagerank 6 link to make your site a pagerank 4. This may in fact be the main reason why my site ranked a pagerank 6 so quickly.

Watch out For Blogrolls On your Website or Blog

This is one of the main reasons why blogs will start losing pagerank. It's all well and good to link to friend's sites, however those links leak your pagerank. You have to make sure the sites you link to have the same if not similar topic or niche that your site has. This is much more powerful for pagerank, as opposed to sites that have nothing to do with yours. Also, make sure you're checking to see that those blogs are linking back to yours. If you honestly enjoy a blog and you think it deserves a link on your site, by all means leave it. Don't just remove it because the other site owner isn't linking to you. However, if you were previously linked to a friends blog or website and they stopped updating, maybe they just stopped blogging all together, I would suggest removing the link on your blog or website.

Asking For Links

It's easy to trade links with your friends or other bloggers that you follow. Sometimes, however, this tactic can go in the opposite direction. Let's say you find a site that you'd like to link to that has a higher pagerank that yours. You have already been linked to the site for quite some time now. You ask the site owner to trade links and they say no or just ignore you. Some bloggers in this case will grow very angry and will blog about the fact. They will slam the blog and even encourage their blogger friends to do the same. This is both immature and unnecessary. There are several reasons why the site owner may not want to trade links with you. Personally, I only trade links with sites on history or archaeology. I'm trying to protect my pagerank and I worked hard to get it, so there's no reason why I should feel obligated to link to a site that has a pagerank 1 and a topic about beauty. That's just an example of course.

Moderate Comments

If you don't have your comments set to moderated, I suggest you do so before you continue reading. I am a strong believer that rich comments that are helpful to my readers deserve to be DoFollow links. However, I receive countless comments everyday with one word and a link to a splash page. This, of course, is an attempt to leak my pagerank and the spammers know what they're doing. Of course, since my site is set to moderated, those comments never make it on the site. If you happen to be one of those bloggers that enjoys receiving tons of comments, even though they have nothing to do with the post you just wrote, by all means keep them all. However, when your sleeping, spammers come in night and leave those comments with linkbacks to all of their blogs. Suddenly, you have a Pagerank 0 and you just have no idea why. This is why!

Also check out:

Blogging 101: How to Set Up a Successful Blog for the Beginner

Blogging 101: How to Prepare Your Blog To Start Making Money Online

Blogging 101: How To Make Money Online Blogging