pagerank

Do you know your blog’s Google PageRank? If not, take a moment to check it out. That little number (between 1 and 10) is very important to the traffic and growth of your blog.

Why? Well Google is one of the most popular Web search engines and the higher your blog’s Google PageRank, the higher you land in the Google search results! Unfortunately there are no defined parameters to improving your ranking because the number is determined by a variety of factors. Google says, “PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.”

There you have it. The more pages with high PageRanks linking to your site, the better! But there are also other tips for improving your blog’s PageRank. These are best practices for any website to follow, but Google approves of them as well.

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. You want every page to be reachable from somewhere on your site. This is easy to do in a blog because you will assign every page one or more categories and tags.
• Create a useful, information-rich site.
• Use appropriate keywords. Think about the words that readers would search, and make sure that your Title and first paragraph includes those words/phrases. You may need to go into your blog software and edit your Title tags to pull in the name of the blog AND the title of your post.
• Crosslink your keywords. If you have an appropriate category, tag, or previous post – crosslink to that within your keywords. This helps SEO and your PageRank.
• Use text to display your important content, instead of an image. Some blogs like to use header images to add visual appeal, which is fine as long as it isn’t the title of your post! In any case, it’s best to use the ALT tag in your images to increase your use of keywords.
• Make sure your links and HTML are correct. Google doesn’t like broken links!
• Keep your linking sparse. It’s good to link out to other sites, but keep it to less than 100.

From what I’ve heard, a good PageRank is 4 or higher. So when you’re looking to obtain inbound links, you’ll want to first check a website or blog to see if they have a rank of at least 4.

Nikki Katz is the Managing Editor for the BlogWorld Blog. Feel free to follow her Twitter @nikki_blogworld and @katzni