The secret of linking

You now know what PR is, and how to increase your site’s PR Getting other websites to link to your site. Now we need to talk about the links themselves. There are ways to link and then there are ways to link. Getting tons of web sites to link to you is important…but HOW they link to you is even more important. Here’s where it gets tricky because you have little to no power over what those other web sites do, or how they link to you. Imaging the Google Bot (that’s the little snippet of computer code, what we call a “robot” or “bot” for short, that Google sends out to scour the Internet searching for web sites that Google can index)….imagine that little Google bot stumbles onto a web site. He scans the web site. He notices that this web site has lots of links to other web sites. The next thing he does is look at the links….he picks them apart…he looks at their anchor text. These all give the Google bot clues as to what those web sites are about. Anchor text….that may be a term you’ve never heard before but it’s one of the most important terms in this eBook and it’s responsible for all the site traffic you’ll ever hope to get…

You’re going  to pay more attention to this next section…

WHAT DETERMINES YOUR GOOGLE PAGERANK?

I’m guessing that this paper was only the basis of Google, the beginning theory…I’m sure Google has evolved quite a bit since that paper was written. Nevertheless, it’ll give you a good understanding of the theory behind PR.  In a nutshell, PR is a calculation of “backlinks”…or…how many other web sites are linking to your site…and not just how many other web sites are linking to you, but the quality of those web sites.

If you have ten PR 2 web sites linking to you, that’s not as good as one or two PR 4 web sites linking to you. So you want to have high PR web sites linking to you (though there’s nothing wrong with having low PR sites linking to you too….high PR sites are better, but low PR sites are better than nothing).

Google PR is based on democracy…every web site that links to you is considered a “vote” for your web site. The site with the most “votes” gets ranked higher. Makes sense right?Google figures that if a whole bunch of web sites (especially high PR web sites) link to you, your site must be good….they wouldn’t link to you if your site was lousy, would they? Well, that’s the logic behind it at least.

So how do you figure out what your web site’s PR is?

To determine your web site’s PR, you need to install the Google Toolbar. It’s a web browser add-on that will show you the PR of every site you visit.

To get the Google Toolbar, go here: http://toolbar.google.com/
You can download the Google Toolbar there for free. The PR feature is an “advanced feature” of the toolbar…so right when you start installation, it will ask you if you want to: “Enable Advanced Features (anonymous information will be sent to Google)”.
You’re going to need to make sure you click that button to enable the advanced features (ie the PageRank tool).
Once you install the Toolbar you can open your web browser and you’ll see it sitting right there at the top of your browser. You can click the “options” button and customize things if you want (that’s where you can disable the pop-up blocker that comes with the toolbar – which I recommend you do).

Once you’ve installed the Google Toolbar, you’ll see a little green bar at the top of your web browser that looks like this:

See that little green bar with the word PageRank over it? If you put your mouse pointer over that little green bar, you’ll see the PR of the site that you are currently visiting. That’s your site’s PR.

Now it’s important to note, Google only updates the Google Toolbar every once in a while…so the PR that the Toolbar is currently showing may not necessarily be what the site’s PR actually is at the moment….but it will give you a good approximation of how well you’re doing.

You can use the Google Toolbar to find out the PR of your site, or virtually any other site as well. That’s good to know. It’s nice to be able to see what your competitor’s PR is!

Take another quick look at that picture above….notice that blue circle with the letter “i” inside it….right next to the PR meter…that’s pretty important too. If you click on it, a small menu will pop up. One of the things on the menu is “backward links”.

That will show you all the other pages that are currently linking to the site that you’re currently looking at. That’s pretty important! Since your PR is based on how many other sites are linking to you, it’s a good thing to be able to tell exactly what sites ARE linking to you…(or what sites are linking to your competitor that gives them such a good PR).

I think it shows the sites that are linking to your site that (themselves) have at least a PR or 3 or higher. Good to know.

Google pagerank explanation

So just what the heck is PageRank and why is it so important to your web site’s traffic? First a little history…. When the founders of Google wrote the academic paper at Stanford that was the basis for the whole idea of Google, that paper dealt largely with PageRank. So you could say that PageRank is the whole basis of Google. So it’s pretty important. PageRank is one of the main factors that Google uses to determine how important a web site is and, therefore, how high to rank that site under a given keyword. Google admits on their web site that they have over 100 different factors that they use to rank a web site. The one we know the most about (and seems to be the most important) is PageRank. (From now on I’ll refer to PageRank as PR). Getting your web site listed at Google is useless if your site’s listed underneath a thousand other sites. In order to make sure people see your web site, you need to be listed within the top 10 or 20 sites listed under a given keyword. That’s where PR comes into play… So what is PR? Good question! PR is a mathematical calculation of how many other web sites are linking to your web site. A web site can have a PR of zero to ten. A PR of zero is bad….a PR of 10 is perfect. I’ve never really seen a PR 10 site (except for Google itself)….it’s very hard to achieve a PR 10. PR 7 is about as good as us ordinary mortals can expect to get…6 is still very good…and a PR of 5 is acceptable. Anything under a 5 and you’re going to want to put some serious work into raising that number. Let me put it into perspective. Let’s say you have a web site about dog grooming. You want to be listed at Google under the keyword phrase “Dog Grooming”. Fair enough. Let’s say that your Dog Grooming web site has a PR of 5. Not bad. Now, your site isn’t the only site in the world about Dog Grooming…. So we head over to Google and type in the phrase “Dog Grooming”….up pops a list of the top ten Dog Grooming web sites. Imagine now that the very first site listed at Google under the phrase “Dog Grooming” has a PR of 7. Remember, we said that your web site has a PR of 5. If you submit your site to Google, would you expect them to list your PR 5 web site above the PR 7 web site that’s already listed there? Nope…. There are exceptions…the highest PR site isn’t always ranked first (remember, Google looks at over 100 different factors when determining how to rank a web site), but chances are, the site with the higher PR is going to be listed first. PR is THAT important. So in that example, you’d have your work cut out for you….you’d need to raise that PR 5 to a good solid PR 6 or 7. But how do you do that?