Best way to improve page rank

[Bristolweb]

I notice many  small business sites seems to have a page rank of 3,4, or 5 which don't appear to be doing a great deal of SEO on their websites. i.e these are very basic sites with a little static content that rarely changes, no blogs or particular links.

Does having a high page rank still mean your will achieve better search engine positions?

whats the best way to improve page rank for small business sites?

thanks

[hireawizseo]

I was looking for similar info thx!

[Dr-Pete]

One trick is that low-quality links can boost PageRank (in the toolbar), but then get devalued or even cause penalties down the row. As @Jarno said, links absolutely matter, but PR is a very, very crude measurement of the value of your links (and doesn't factor in trust, relevance, spam, etc.).

It's also important to note that Toolbar PR can be as much as 3-4 months out of date at any given time.

[JarnoNijzing]

bristol,

you are completely right, quality links outrank poor quality links any day. It's even so that when you can get 10 high quality links to your website for a keyword e.g. Vacuum cleaners from website with high authority and high PR them self that your competitor maybe need to get a 100 lower quality links to get to the same result. So image what would happen if you can get a 100 or even 500 good quality links to your websites? Your competitors would have to try to get about a 1000 to 5000 links for the exact same result. And when Google decides that quality is even more important then quantity these numbers might even go up more. Quality is everything to Google.

Yes it is very smart to get links to the deeper pages of your website. Keep in mind that tier 2 or 3 pages on your website also link to your homepage so there still is a link-juice flow. That's why it is a smart on-line strategy.

Staying on the example of vacuum cleaners if your deeper pages are brands of vacuum cleaners you should make sure you get high quality links to those page stating: "brand-name vacuum cleaners" e.g. for Philips Vacuum Cleaners you want the inbound links to say exactly that. Since you also name your primary keyword you keep on topic of your site which in turn results in better rankings for your primary keyword. A fun game isn't it?

When sending e-mails to websites for high quality links you could always try something like this:

"Hello.

Let me introduce myself first...introduction.

We noticed your website in our search for Vacuum Cleaners and we must say, our compliments on a piece of art (suck up some more)

Maybe you'll find this an interesting link to share with your community:

yourlink.co.uk

I'm really hoping you would share this link on your website and in return i will inform my community about yours. (this generates a possibility for a 3 way linking so you link to them from another website-> which is your "community")

Hope to hear from you soon

Kind regards/Best Wishes or whatever you want to conclude with,

Yourname

Yoursite.co.uk"

I use a similar version of this in the netherlands in dutch so i translated it roughly for you. I think you can get where to change the specifics? You could also search on this Q&A forum for "e-mail linking" or "e-mail baiting" because i know i saw something about this here earlier. Can't find the link right now.

I do not know if this is allowed in the UK to send to people but maybe you can adapt it a little so it should be fine. I don't know all the laws over there.

Hope this helps

Kind regards

Jarno

[Bristolweb]

Hi Jamo

Thanks for your  reply, I have started to use  SEOmoz to trace back links of competitors and i notice a large number of them seem to have  a large amount of inbound  links from poor quality non relevant links  from places on the other side of the world.

I presume  if i gained a lower number of inbound link but from  higher quality sites it would put my sites in better stead  and improve their page ranks.

Most links at present  target the root index page which has a page rank of 3 and all others a page rank of 1 - I take it i would need to use keyword rich anchor text and link to some of the sites other pages from relevant sites to improve teh page rank of these pages also.

Any advice on who to gain / request links from quality websites, how does sending a link request email fare up with spam laws of sending unsolicited emails?

I am based in the UK

Thanks

[JarnoNijzing]

Dear Bristolweb,

in some way it still does. Page Rank as you know is being build be gathering links to your websites. PR from the linking website to your own flows over a little. The same goes with Domain Authority and other metrics.

The more people "vote" on your website the better Google will have to like your site because people told Google this is what we would like to see.

So:

quality linking to your websites increases page rank - > more quality links improve your metrics -> more quality links improve your position in Google.

If you really want o improve your pages rank or page rank or whatever name you want to use you could commit yourself to a on-line community asking question, answering questions about the subject of your website. Linking to it from the community helps a lot and also spend time on link building. Use the tools provided by SEOMoz to check out your competitors and make sure you get a link on that page. It could only help not harm your site (not completely true but it's all about the essence in here).

So to sum up my advise:

Yes, PR of pages rank is a (very small) factor in the Google Algorithm so it's still important.

Should you focus on it? In a way: Yes. As I already explained PR is mainly build on the number of "Votes" that go to your websites. So getting more Votes improves your PR and improve the amount of traffic (when you get quality votes) which in turn is a factor in the Algorithm.

Focus on gaining good quality links to your website. It will help!