6 Ways to Improve Your Google Page Rank and Link Popularity

Once you have researched your keywords and optimized your website for the search engines, the most powerful way to get a higher search engine ranking is by improving your page rank and your link popularity. This involves increasing the number of links back to your own website from other websites and can be achieved in a variety of ways. The best way is by creating unique or unusual content so that people want to link to you without you even asking then, but unfortunately if you have a brand new website, you need people to find your website first, so most of us have to put in some effort into building backlinks ourselves.

Here are the best ways to improve your Google Page Rank and increase your Link Popularity and some tools to help you do it.

Writing and distributing Articles

Write an article of around 500 words or so on the same topic as your website and add a short “about the author” or resource box. In this resource box you can add a link back to your website (in some directories up to 3 links) and then distribute this article to as many article directories as you can. If you are submitting your article to directories manually this can take a fair bit of time so it is worth doing some analysis upfront to choose the best directories (hint – look at the page rank and Alexa rank as a guide).

Tools to help you with article submission:

• Article Post Robot – this software allows you to submit articles automatically to hundreds of article directories. There is an option
• Submit Your Article - This is a service that submits articles to directories on your behalf. You can enter unlimited articles every month and the system will send them to article directories and publishers automatically.

Submitting your website to Link Directories

There are hundreds of directories on the internet ranging from the well known directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo Dir to lots of smaller local or niche directories. Many of these directories allow you to submit your website for free. It’s just a case of visiting the directory, navigating to the category that matches the theme of your website and submitting your website URL and a description of your site. You can either do this manually or use one of the following tools to help you.

• Link Directory Submitter - this software allows you to submit your website to over 2000 directories on the internet. You can save multiple versions of your “profile” to allow you to vary the anchor text and description for your submission.
• Article Aware Link Directory Submission Service – this service will submit your site to 400 internet directories very cheaply and provide you with screenshots of each submission.

Posting on forums that allow a signature containing a link

There are thousands of forums on the web for all sorts of different niches. Many of these forums allow you to include a “signature” at the end of each post which can include a link to one or more websites. This is a great way to get extra exposure and a free backlink. Just search in Google for your keywords and the word “forum” and find a list of forums that are relevant to the niche of your website. Just be sure to follow the forum rules and never spam.

Reciprocal Linking & 3 Way Linking

Reciprocal linking is simply exchanging links with another webmaster. You add a link to their website in exchange for them adding a link to your website. Reciprocal linking is not as valuable as the one way linking methods described in this article, but it is a useful way to increase your link popularity and page rank.

3 Way linking is an alternative way of exchanging links and looks more natural to the search engines. As an example, say you have 3 websites – A, B and C. 3 Way linking would involve site A linking to site B, site B linking to site C and site C linking to site A. All websites get the benefit of a backlink but this is seen as a one way link rather than a reciprocal link, making it slightly more valuable.

Here are some tools that can help with reciprocal linking and 3 Way linking.

• Link Machine – this tool can be installed on your website and allows you to exhchange reciprocal links quickly and easily with other webmasters without having to code the HTML each time.
• 3 Way Links – allows you to 3 way link with a network of other websites in a fully automated manner.

Commenting on other peoples’ websites and blogs

The majority of blogs and some websites allow you to leave a comment, usually with a link to your website. This can be good in terms of getting some additional traffic (if your comment is interesting enough) and for increasing the number of backlinks to your site. If you decide to do this purely for backlinks be aware that most blogs and some websites will use an attribute called “nofollow” which basically stops your link being counted as a backlink. This tag is to prevent spam comments and you can check for the presence of this by viewing the source of the page and searching for “nofollow”. Despite this there are still many blogs and websites where you can get the benefit of a backlink from. Here is a list of blogs that do follow to help you get started.

Social Bookmarking

You may have already heard of websites such as StumbleUpon, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Digg. These are called Social Bookmarking sites and are an alternative to using search engines to find pages. While search engines rely on criteria such as on page optimization and number of backlinks to rank websites, Social Bookmarking websites rely on people to “vote” for or “bookmark” sites and base the popularity of a particular web page on the number of votes rather than the number of backlinks.

You can also get the benefit of a backlink from Social Bookmarking websites. Whenever you add a new page to your website or make a blog post you should bookmark your new page on some of the social bookmarking website. Be careful not to go overboard with the bookmarking, as some services will actually ban you if they think you are using the bookmarking service purely to promote your website. One way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is to bookmark lots of other pages that you find relevant or interesting as your surf.

Tools to help you:

• Onlywire – bookmark your site in over 20 bookmarking sites at once
• Web2Submitter – submit your site to many Web2.0 high traffic sites with one click

If you incorporate these 6 methods of link building into your marketing plan you are sure to see an increase in link popularity and page rank in the near future.