Google has a complex algorithm in place to calculate the value or Pagerank of a website. However, if you will follow the 2 simple techniques that I present here, you will be able to easily increase the PR of your website.

Build links from high PR websites

The easiest way to boost the PR of your site is to create backlinks from websites whose PR is already high. When you create such links, it indicates Google that your website is important as other high PR websites link to it. If you can build a few of these links, it can have a great effect.

Just remember to build links in a natural way by not creating a number of links overnight. If you build a lot of links in a small span of time, Google may think that you are trying to manipulate things and it will not prove fruitful for your website. Also, such links should come from high PR websites within your niche. Building links from all sorts of sites is of no use. Google values targeted links.

Good amount of backlinks

You might not find it easy to build sufficient amount of backlinks from high Pagerank sites. This can be due to various factors. An alternative is to create large amount of low PR links. You may think that it’s of no use to create such links as it will not benefit your website. You are right to some extent but these links do provide an advantage.

If you build some high PR backlinks along with a number of low PR backlinks, it will be a good strategy for your website. Of course, you need to be patient about building links and never be in a hurry. Low PR links do have less value but they are still vital as having only high PR links would not seem natural and you may even get penalized by Google for this.

Remember, quality along with quantity is the way to go in order to build a high Pagerank for your website.

Deep links are those links that do not directly point to the home page of your website. These links are directed towards other pages that have more specific information. Everyone wants to bring lots of visitors to their websites but they ignore the significance of traffic that can be brought to the inside pages. You can consider these pages as separate websites that are all based on different topics, catering to some specific topic/niche.

The home page generally contains generic information about the subject that your website is based on. In order for visitors to come to your website and stay for a long time, you need to present the specific information they are looking for. Deep links solve this problem. If your link building strategy is done in such a way that it gives ample importance to build backlinks that directly bring the traffic to the inner pages of your website, you will see sufficient amount of traffic to your website as a whole.

Targeted traffic is always better than generic traffic as it increases the probability of an ad getting clicked or a sale being made. If you are not already building links in such a way, you just need to make a small change in your link building strategy and your work will be done.

You need to replace the link to the home page with a deep link and you also need to target specific keywords related to the deep link. It does not mean that you should stop building links for the home page, but only that you should give due importance to building deep links as well.

So, start building links in this fashion and enjoy looking at the traffic stats.

• Choose valuable directories that are popular and have high PageRank.
• Choose directories that are themselves optimized as you don’t want search engines to have a hard time finding your links.
• Never go for automated submissions to directories. Automated submissions might be unable to choose an appropriate category for your website. It is also important to change the description a bit for different submissions as it ensures that the descriptions remain unique for search engines.
• Submit your website to the best category. You can start from the topmost category and then keep choosing the sub-categories until you have the correct category for your website. If you are unable to find the best category, choose the closest or the most related category. This is significant because if you don’t choose an appropriate category, your submission would not be approved and you also do not want the search engines to get confused about the exact topic your website is based on.
• It is better to choose a directory that does not require reciprocal links. However, if it is mandatory and the web directory is worth it, you can go for it.
• Submit a valid email address and keep a note of the web directories that are being used for website submission as it can be useful to track the effectiveness of submissions in future. This data will also help you when you need to do submissions for another website.

So, submit you website to quality directories in order to build some nice backlinks and diversify your SEO strategy.

When people enter search terms in search engines like Google, it matches that search term with the keywords present on your website. If the search engine finds the keywords appropriate it displays your website as one of the results. So, it is very important to know which search terms are popular with people and what are the best keywords that can be targeted.

There are some popular keyword tools available in the market. Some of them can be used for free and others offer paid services. Tools like Wordtracker and Google AdWords Keyword tool are a couple of good options. When you enter a search term, these tools provide the volume of searches made for that keyword and some other related keyword suggestions.

It is not always a good idea to choose a term that has the highest number of searches because the competition would be a lot stiff for such a search term. For example, if the term ‘webhosting’ has 1 million search results in a month and suppose there are 5 million websites already competing for the top spot for this keyword, it would be almost impossible for your website to top the search results or even get to the first few pages.

However, if we see the search results for ‘proxy webhosting’, there would be a fewer searches but the competition would be quite less. If you have a website that offers proxy webhosting, it will be much easier for you to get to the top results if you include the right keywords in page title, meta tags and other text. So, choose a term that has enough number of searches but less competition.

Another important trend to note is that a lot of webmasters optimize their websites for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those that are normally of 3 to 5 words. Such keywords look unimportant but a lot of people use them as the search term. So, it’s a wise decision to include such keywords in your website.

We can see that going for less popular and long tail keywords will usually provide you with much more traffic then going for highly competitive terms where you have little chance of ever getting on the first page of results, so choose your keywords wisely rather than following the crowd.

So, grab a list of the best keywords and start building your website based on those keywords to get top rankings in search engines as well as a lot of high-quality traffic to your website.

• Quality content
  This might not be a new thing for you but this is still the most basic and most important thing to do. Build a website that offers unique and valuable content to the website visitors. Nice websites with good keyword placement throughout the conent naturally attract search engines as well as visitors.

• Keyword targeting
  Another significant thing is to target the right keywords. You cannot expect your site to be on top for multiple keywords. So, you should never target a lot of keywords at the same time. Try to target a main keywords and  sometimes a few other important keywords. The keywords should be selected with care as they go a long way to achieving that all important first place in Google.

  Don’t ignore the importance of long-tail keywords as they have a lot less competition and it is easier to get first place in Google for these keywords. So, do some research with a couple of keyword tools and make a list of the best keywords. Then target those keywords in title, body, tags, meta tags, etc. However, don’t overuse them or your site might get penalized by search engines. Maintaining an optimum keyword density is important. If you stuff a lot of keywords, this may turn-off visitors. Remember that you are building a website for visitors and optimizing it for search engines.

• Quality inbound links
  If your website has a lot of quality inbound links, search engines will realize the value of your site and it will get high rankings in search engines. Valuable websites naturally receive backlinks from other websites. However, there are a few methods that you can implement as a part of the link building process. Link exchange with quality websites is a good way of building links. Links from .edu websites are of high value. Include relevant anchor text while building links.

Getting first place in Google might not always be possible, but follow the tips above to give you a head start and don’t forget, nothing is impossible for a hard working webmaster!

Problem is, even if you have great content it can be a struggle to get anyone to read it or link to it, and this is just as important as the content itself. Even if your website is full of brilliantly written, articulate and intelligent content, that is updated regularly with more fresh content being added all the time, if nobody knows about it, then its value is just about zero.

So what to do once you have all your nice shiny content on your site, how do you get folks to read it, how do you get them to link to it, and how can you make them come back for more?

Target Keywords

First of all you need to make sure your content is targeting appropriate keywords, if you write the greatest article and fail to include the best keywords to draw traffic then you are missing a trick. You should use keyword tools such as Google Trends to find good keywords for your content, this tool allows you to see what people have been looking for recently on Google and therefore gives you the most up-to-date information on what keywords you should be targeting for your new content.

Next thing is to make sure you are including several keywords to cover the subject of your content. The Google Adwods tool is great for this, it allows you to enter a keyword and then see other related keywords that people are searching for along with estimated search numbers and other information.

Keyword Inclusion

Once you start to create your content, you need to keep at the front of your mind the various keywords you are targeting, it maybe a good idea to write down the keywords on a sticky or notepad and put it in front of you as you type, this will remind you to keep focus on the keywords you are targeting and make sure you include those words at regular intervals throughout your text.

Don’t over do the number of times you include your keywords, probably 1-2 times every 100 words would be optimum, so if you write a 500 word article you can include each of your keywords 5 to 10 times. Don’t forget to include them in the title of your content too, but make sure it reads correctly, do not include keywords that make the title grammatically poor.

While your at it, make sure your meta tags are optimized for the same keywords, get your Title, Description and Keywords tags to compliment your keyword targeted content.

Tell ‘Em About It!

Once your article is written and supremely optimized, you need to get the word out. Have a ‘Latest Posts’ or similar section on your homepage that shows the latest 3 or items you have written.

Give users the opportunity to subscribe to your content, use Feedburner for this so you have stats on he number of people subscribe and trends in usage.

Use the ‘Latest Blog’ feature found on many forums to have a link to your newest post, and post on related forums regularly.

By crafting your content carefully, targeting appropriate keywords, and making sure the word slowly spreads of your great posts and articles, you will, over time, ensure the success of your site. Folks will find your content, read it, link to it and then come back for more, what more could you ask for!

Some common mistakes are:

• Link exchange without any research
  Exchanging links with sites in your niche can be quite valuable for your website. However, it is of no use to exchange links with every site even if they rank well or receive a lot of traffic. They should be related to the content of your site and add some value to the information that is already being shared with your website visitors. If you exchange links with sites on any topic, search engines might punish you and the traffic that you will receive will be of low quality as people would not be interested in what your site has to offer.

• The more the merrier
  This doesn’t apply to link building. It would not be of much use if your site has a lot of backlinks from websites that don’t have a PR or ranking in search engines. So, quality over quantity applies here. You should concentrate on building links with quality sites.

• Irrelevant anchor text
  If it is possible for you to select the anchor text, mostly include good keywords rather than irrelevant keywords or website names. It is ok to sometimes include your website name as the anchor text just for making your website popular and brand-building but it should not be a regular practice.

• Majority of home page links
  Another common mistake is to build links in such a way that they only link to the home page of the site. This will do a lot of good for the home page but other pages would be neglected. Your strategy should be to get maximum number of pages indexed in search engines. The home page is a general page for your website and other pages provide more specific information. So, it would be nice if visitors land directly at the other pages as well.

• Most of the links coming from a single website/IP address
  This should be avoided as search engines don’t consider this as a part of natural link building process.

• No outbound links
  Search engines expect sites to link to authority sites and they consider this as a good sign. So, outbound links to authority sites will work well for the overall quality of your website.

• Building thousands of links in a short span of time
  Some people use software to build links through blackhat methods. These may produce some high quality links quickly and the website may get good initial results, however, search engines would soon come to know about the technique you are using on your website and the site would be penalized or banned from search engines. So, you should not build an unnatural number of links in a short time.

If you keep the above tips in mind and avoid committing such mistakes, your website will grow slowly and organically and search engines will trust your site and content and over time this will result in excellent rankings.

On-page and off-page optimization are closely related to each other. It is very important to create content that attract links on its own. Others would naturally link to your site when they think that your site can add some value to the content of their site. So, your site should have quality content and it should present fresh and unique information. This should serve as the basis for any link building strategy. Now let’s look at some important link building strategies that are very effective:

Link exchange

• This involves exchanging links with sites in the same niche. Normally, others would exchange links when they think that it would be beneficial for them as well. So, when you contact the site owner, you need to inform them about the benefits of the link exchange and it is very important that you already have reliable content on your site. It’s a good idea to include their link on your site in advance. Then inform them that you have already included their link and you will appreciate if they can include your link on their page. This way, they will have to think twice before saying ‘No’. You should do link exchange only with quality sites. The most important benefit of link exchange is that it provides related and high-quality link and if the other site has a PR, it would be even better. It will also bring some traffic to your site as people would be interested to see the related content on your site.

Article directories

• Articles directories can help you in building quality links and driving traffic as well. You need to write fresh articles (related to your site) and submit them to article directories. You may be allowed to include a couple of links in the article. However, the main section is the resource box where you write a short note about yourself and probably your profession and also include a couple of links to your site. If you submit a few good-quality articles to top article directories like Ezine Articles, you would get a lot of related links to your site.

Guest writer

• Contact bloggers of some high-quality blogs related to your niche and inform them that you are willing to write free and unique content for them in exchange for a link to your site. Write a short and impressive article as a sample and let them know that the article you are willing to write would be of the same quality. They would come to know that you are serious about this and would easily agree to your offer. If they like your site, they might also provide links to your site in some other posts.

Press release

• First, you need to create an optimized and newsworthy press release. Once it is created, you need to send it to a few journalists and bloggers. If they find it interesting, they would write about your site and you would receive some quality links.

Submitting links to directories

• Though this method doesn’t work as well as it used to be, you can still use it to build links. Keep in mind that quality still matters.

The above list is not exhaustive as it is almost impossible to mention all the link building strategies. However, this list mentions about some sensible link building strategies for SEO.