Little over a week ago, I announced that Google had updated PageRank, a figure which gives an insight to your site's popularity on the internet. With only small changes with my sites' PR, I've been looking for ways to increase my PageRank and get higher placement in search results.

Although PageRank is updated every 3-4 months, or so, Google pretty much uses day-by-day statistics to generate "internal PageRank." This can not be seen by anyone, but does impact result page placement for specific keywords. I have noticed some improvement with these techniques, and expect to see more in the long term.

Backlinks

One of the main factors in determining your PageRank is to look at the PageRank for your backlinks. There are three general rules for estimating PageRank:

• 4 PRx backlinks will give you a PageRank of (x-1)
• 19 PRx backlinks will give you a PageRank of x
• 101 PRx backlinks will give you a PageRank of (x+1)

So, for example, 4 PR5 backlinks should theoretically give us a PageRank of 4. Of course, this is just a rough figure, and we'll never be able to tell how Google truly calculates PageRank.

Step 1: Get Natural Backlinks

Natural backlinks tend to have PageRank ranging between 0-4. This generally allows many pages, commonly blog posts, to achieve PR3 or PR4, with the homepage PR4-5. To get higher ranking backlinks, your content has to be of high quality and you site must be quite popular.

Pages which naturally get huge numbers of backlinks are called linkbait. To be linkbait, an article or content should be written by a unique point of view and be valuable information. This isn't really the time or place for a guide on how to write linkbait, so I'll leave that to someone else.

Step 2: Trade Links

One method of getting backlinks is to trade links with other webmasters. This is where you ask a webmaster to link to your webpage, if you link to theirs. The best thing is the fact that it is free, and all you have to do is ask. In the past, I've been "afraid" of asking for link exchanges, despite many websites being happy for such a scheme. Generally it is a win-win situation, but having too many exchanged links may have negative effects.

If you are thinking about asking, or have been asked, to trade links, then you have got to judge whether you will benefit. Their page should have a decent PageRank which is not extreme to your PageRank. For example, if your page was PR6 and theirs PR3, it would not be beneficial to exchange.

Trading links can also bring some good quality traffic to a page, so it is best to negotiate a good link positioning and only trade with sites on the same topic, and with a similar point of view and similar content.

Step 3: Buy Links

Another way of getting backlinks, which Google doesn't like, is to buy links from services such as TNX (aff) and Text Link Ads (aff). Although many people express their concerns about these services, they are pretty much safe in my point of view. Your link that is sold through TNX or Text Link Ads will have absolutely no associated with the two companies, meaning Google should never find out. So, in my view, it is worth the extremely minimal risk (if you have the money).

On the other hand, buying links might not give you the return you wanted. Some links can be expensive and offer little advantage to you. Traffic is a by-product of buying links for PR, so be sure you link has good placement. I would only buy links as a last resort, so be careful and do make rash decisions.

Step 4: Make your own luck

Many websites present the opportunity to link back to your site, often passively. The best examples are blogs and forums, where you can usually provide your website address.

Many blogs allow you to link your name to your website in comments, and you may occasionally have an excuse to place a link in the actual comment itself. These links often have impact on your PageRank and can bring a little traffic.

With forums, you can link to your site from your profile and in your signature. I believe this is less effective than blog comments, but it can still contribute to your PageRank.

These links may contribute to your PageRank. They will not affect PR if they are no-follow, so it is worthwhile to make sure they do follow before using any of your effort. SearchStatus for Firefox will tell you straight away whether links follow or not.

Step 5: Get Links from .gov and .edu Sites

PageRank is a measure of importance, so it makes sense to weigh official links when generating PageRank. .gov and .edu pages are highly regarded by Google because they are associated to the government, and education.

HMRC.gov.uk has a PageRank of 7, apparently with 64 inlinks. ProBlogger, a non-official website, has PR 6, with nearly 40,000 inlinks.

It is very difficult to get natural links from these official websites, as many of us have little association with the government. However, a lot of blogs, particularly from universities, exist with these extensions. Leaving comments, linking back to your site/page*, on these blogs can be very useful. Try searching with these queries for blogs, forums and guesbooks:

• site:edu inurl:blog computer security - replace "computer security" with a relevant topic.
• site:edu "powered by wordpress"
• site:edu inurl:forum
• site:edu guestbook

Replace edu with other extensions, such as gov, gov.uk and other international variants.

* By "linking back", I do not mean spamming. Just have your name link in comments, or reference and link to your page when relevant to the content.

See my notes in step 4 about no-follow links.

Let's get started

Thank you for reading. Lukily, Making the Web doesn't use no-follow links, so you can start with step 4 and leave a comment. Have you got any other ideas or suggestions? I'd like to hear them…