SEO TIPS: The Importance Of PR

Everyone that is building a brand on the web is concerned with their PageRank (PR). PR helps offer not only guidance into whether you are doing it right or wrong, but as to what kind of authority and/or popularity your site has. In general, it is a way to see what kind of online presence you have. As such, people want the highest PR they can possibly get on the 0-10 scale – 10 being the best and extraordinarily rare. Because of that webmasters will do just about anything to improve their PR.

What many webmasters don’t grasp is that improving their PageRank is pretty basic. Many webmasters, however, have no clue as to how to go aqbout doing it. They think it takes immense skills and maybe the initiation into some secret society to make any gains. What is the answer to the question, “How do I improve my website’s PageRank? From the moment Google’s PageRank (named for Larry Page, co-founder) sprang to popularity, website owners have been trying to improve PageRank, or PR. Many spend several years to reach their dream PR number. The answer as to how to do it, however, is really very simple.

Here’s a little bit about how PR is calculated so you can start from a position of strength. Google uses around 200 factors to rank websites and to assign PR. Some factors are known and some are proprietary secrets. You don’t need to know every aspect of the algorithm, however, to make advances.  Gaining good PR is achievable only by using an organic approach. You can’t game the system – at least not with much success or very long without incurring a penalty or being sandboxed.  One of the most important factors that will help you boost your website’s PageRank is still link building.

Google values websites with many backlinks and even assesses your website’s importance to a certain extent using the number of other websites on the web that are linking to you. The key to this, however, is quality and relevance. You can’t have any old garbage link up from an unrelated site and expect to get benefits from it anymore. Google has stomped down on the bulk approach and refined their view toward quality. That is the first important lesson you need to learn.

The reason why Google use backlinks as one of the main factors is authority. In the offline world, authors who want to establish their point while writing refer to the works of other writers, and for credibility’s sake. Generally, they refer only to other popular and creditworthy writers to help establish their postition and credibility. Thus the later importance of a writer’s work was assessed based on the extensiveness of its usage in the literary world by the other respected writers.

The same goes for backlinking online. When we get links from authority websites and other websites with good PR, Google considers this as an indicator of the importance of your own website. It is the same exact principle that is in play. The more credible you are, the more other credible sites will want to be associated to you via citations. This is one of the main reasons why people spend thousands of dollars on link building and in getting links from websites with high PR. It does make a major difference.

Read more about PR on our News blog!