Who knows better how to improve your PR than Google

A little about it

Page Rank or PR – The Holy Graal of webmasters. I don't intend to describe what it is or how to improve it. Internet is full of more or less interesting articles about this. I just want to share some of my experience. This website has started with PR0 which is nothing unusual. But of course I wanted to know how to improve it.

I've searched the web and read many articles describing what Page Rank is. Some of them give clues how to increase this value. It is interesting that for many people this indicator seems to be a little artificial. Everyone aims for PR10 but few knows the real reason. If website has good content it will be displayed on top of the searches for interesting keywords even if it has poor page rank.

Usefull clues

All articles, blogs and Google tips leads to conclusion that content of your website must be interesting for people. Don't try to cheat web crawlers or dont rely only on exchange links with other websites. If the site is interesting its PR will improve sooner or later. Yes, I know that everybody prefers sooner.

All recommendations, from my point of view, are just result of good content:

1. As much as possible external links to website. If people find something interesting on our website they will link to it.
2. Many subpages. Website with usefull content will grow either by content from author, company or community. In my example I've released an open source product. Now I have to maintain issue tracker with bugs, announce new releases or fixes in news, add files for download. In the meantime I'm writing small articles
3. Existence in catalogs. Add your website to internet catalogs either related to business or technology. For technology absolute minimum is www.dmoz.org and dir.yahoo.com. Even Google admits that it uses them.
4. Penalties. Don't cheat. There are many techniques that are trying to improve the ranking: cloaking pages,hidden text or links, loading pages with irrelevant but popular words etc. For using this practices you can be excluded from index.

Google Webmaster Tools

After hours of searching I found this usefull feature on my Google account. But better late then never. Just login to your Google account (or create one if you don't have one). In section My Services follow the link Webmaster Tools. Insert url of your website and press OK.

Verification

First step is to verify that you are the ower of this website. There are two approaches. Changing meta tag on your home page or uploading file with given, random id inside page root directory. Its quick and easy – just follow the informations on the screen.

Diagnostic

After verification we can start exploring information Google has gathered about our website. This tab allows as to check if our robots.txt file is correct, how often our site is crawled and other tiny bits.

Statistics

This tab shows search statistics that are related to our website. First we can see which pages were crawled by googlebot, what is their page rank and which of them have the biggest value. Page analysis shows the keywords that Google has indexed for our website. It also shows words used in external sites to link to our site.

Links

This tab is, I think, most interesting of all. Especially short after website was launched when we want to get our first PR (like me in the moment of writing this). Here we have listing of all urls used in external websites to point our website. Each link is described by number of pages that use it. Additionally we can click the number and see every one of them.

What next?

Now we know the page rank principles – after reading this article and other. Also we are aware of reality because we know what Google knows about our website. We have quite a lot information to decide further steps. What to do to increase external links? Add more content, make it more interesting or participates in an affiliate program? The soution is not simple but I think we are closer to it.