The page rank of a web page will determine, in addition to several other factors, on which position it should show on SERPs (search engine result pages), but it is NOT the most important factor. In addition the page rank is a page rank, not a web site rank, so every single page of a site could have a different rank value.
The highest PR is 10 and the lowest PR is 0. Having a PR0 doesn't necessarily mean a penalty, as many think it does, when it is in reference to a newly registered domain or a domain registered long ago in which there has been no activity. A very new domain will show a n/a page rank value for the fist 2 months or so, then it could go to PR0 or any other PR value depending on the activity registered since then.
The PR of a web site is basically calculated from the number of external links that the web site has indexed by Googlebot or Yahoo Slurt. After the robots index a link, it could take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months for it to add points to the page's rank.
External links are links that point to a web site from other web sites. If a web site out there has a link to you, it will be one external link to your web site. Of course, for the link to be counted, it has to be indexed by the crawlers. Some crawlers tend to index more links then others, Yahoo, for example, usually will count more external links then Google. The more external links a web site has, the higher it's PR will be. In other words, to increase your PR you must get links from other web sites to you. Every link to you is counted as a vote and will increase your PR.
Quality and quantity of the external links are the main fact used by Google and Yahoo to score one's web site. Quantity is the number of links to your web site from others (external links) and quality mainly comes from two aspects: The web sites linking to your web site must be relevant to you, and the links should use a keyword that is relevant to you as well.
Quality has shown to be far more important then quantity, therefore choose well your mutual links to make sure they are really helping you.
Another important factor are the quantity of internal links (links between your pages). The easiest ways to stop your website from obtaining a good rank position on crawlers is to make it difficult for the robots to find their way through your pages. You should never use scripting tools or fancy drop-down navigation tools to link through your pages. But yes, just use basic links to go from one page to another within your web site. robots cannot understand scripts so your pages will not be crawled unless you use basic HTML linking, preferentially without image buttons. If you use image buttons it is recommended to make sure every button has a title tag with a description of the link.
The Page Rank gets updated once every 6 months only. It has been updated, for example, on late April, 2007. That was when the PR for Getmyownsite.com went from 0 to 2.
Page Rank has been updated again late October. The PR for Getmyownsite.com went from 2 to 3 on October 25th.
The page rank that is published from the internal databases of Google usually has a 90 days refresh rate. Which means that it is a snapshot of what the page rank of a single URL was at a certain time within about three months. PR is not real time information, although it is being calculated to several decimals and updated constantly, a web page with PR0 shown may very well have a higher score, and the opposite may happen as well.
The first step is finding web sites with good PR that are relevant to your web site and offer a reciprocal link. Make sure the link will be placed in a page that is not more then 2 clicks away from their home page and in a directory not more then 2 folders away from the main folder otherwise this link will not have significant value. Also make sure that there are not too many links already placed on top of your link on that page, a link following several other links will have its value decreased as well.
I also suggest you to sign up to forums and blogs and leave notes where you could possibly insert a link to your site. But you must do this carefully without letting the board supervisor realize your intentions. Leave a constructive comment or answer someone's question and use the opportunity to talk about your web site and possibly place a link to it. Most of those forums can be found from a regular search and require you to sign up. Well it will certainly be worth the time spent.
As I mentioned before, I am sure that there are several topical directories and smaller business directories for every topic that will accept free submissions and these should definitely be considered. Even if they have low PR they will provide reasonably relevant external links (links to your page) and help build your page rank. You can find these directories from a regular search and you should try to sign up to as many as you can. You can also try using the Free URL Submission Tool to obtain several links from good standing directories.
Not every link will be counted by Google. For example, Google filters out links from known link farms. It is very important to understand also that some links can cause harm to your web site! External links can never be harmful once you cannot control them but you can certainly control which sites you will link to. If you link your web site to a penalized web site, you could be penalized. Therefore be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it. If you are afraid of being penalized but still want to link to that web site you can use the attribute "rel" set to "nofollow" (rel="nofollow") inside the link tag. This attribute was created by Google, together with other search engines, and will instruct robots to ignore the link just like it never existed.
It is also very important that these external links should have a relative anchor text to your web site, for example, if your name is Robert and you are a dentist in New York City, you want the links to say "dentist in New York" or "NYC dentist" or any other popular keyword but definitely you don't need it to say "Robert" once it's not a related keyword. In addition, if your domain is called www.robertdentistnyc.com, it can help you considerably if you print the domain name with capital letters to separate every word on your domain, which can be considered keywords, so you would write it as www.RobertDentistNyc.com:
<a href="http://www.RobertDentistNyc.com/" >dentist New York<a>
The example above is a very smart link to your site and Google can recognize three keywords inside your domain name by the use of capital letters. The anchor text "dentist New York" will help you to high-rank when someone searches for that exactly term. It is recommended to use a variation of keywords in your inbound links once too many similar anchor texts might be considered spam and will actually lower your position for that keyword.
In the other hand, the example below would be a very wrong way to link to your site:
<a href="http://www.robertdentistnyc.com/index.html" >Robert<a>
And, at last but not at least, you should have constructive and informative content on your web site, just like the information provided in here. By providing valuable information, you are providing a service and eventually, this will be a reason for someone to place a link to your web site.
It is also interesting to remember that visitors usually pay much more attention to a link placed inside of a paragraph (in the page copy) then to any other links in the menus, footers, headers or other peripheral areas of the page. In addition, paragraphs with bolded or underlined links cause more attention to the eye then regular paragraphs. Therefore, links inside paragraphs not only should drive more traffic but might also provide extra ranking value. Copy links are usually related to the paragraph in which they pertain only, and not to the entire site's content, for this reason search engines probably give them special attention.
Google offers two basic tools to study any website's linking structure. One is used to count how many inbound (external links) a domain has and the other one can be used to find which domain have the highest relevancy for a given keyword in the inbound links.
Make a search in Google for link:www.anydomainhere.com and this will show you how many external links the domain have indexed by Google from web sites with PR3 and over. Low page rank web sites will not show on the list but will still count toward the domain punctuation. This tool doesn't really work so well but it's all that we have available right now.
Make a search in Google for allinanchor:any keyword here and this will tell you which web sites are most related to that keyword, in other words, which web sites have more powerful external links with that keyword in the anchor text.
I have noticed that, if you use this tool to check your own domain in some crawlers, like Alexa, you will loose punctuaction. Yes, for every time you check it you will loose few external links. I can't realy confirm which crawlers and how often this can happen because I just avoid using it at all. It should be ok to use it once. Google and Yahoo provides special tools for you to track inbound links without prejudice but you need to verify your domain first by adding a meta tag to your index file or uploading an empty html file with a specific name to your ftp.
For morer information please visit the Google Webmasters Tool and the Yahoo Site Explorer tool.
Several webmasters disregard that the robots are way smarter and well instructed then what you could ever think. Both Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp can take millions of facts in consideration when evaluating a web site. One known issue, as I mentioned above when describing how to properly write your external links, is that if the external links of a web site show always the same anchor text, it will raise the question on how much control the webmaster had over the wording of its own votes. Years of studies have shown a highly predictable pattern of natural linking in regards of anchor link texts used, therefore, if you use too many times the same anchor text on your external links (for example: dentist New York) this may lead to page penalties that will lower the position for the site on searches for the keyword in reference or even being banned from the Google index.
Other method of spamming that is easily detected by the robots is Keyword Stuffing. It describes a spamming method of which now has a proper counter measure in the system of Google. Using improper length or irrelevant phrases in anchor text when pointing to an internal page may trigger the applying of a filter, and lower the rankings of the URL for searches that include the used words. Continued misuse of anchor text may also lead to the excluding of the domain from the Index, including the source and target pages as well. Recent additions to spam filtering now examine the relevancy of the target page closely, therefore you should only title your tags with relevant words that are found in the targeted page. In certain cases highly competitive commercial terms included in the anchor text, but to a page that is not relevant to them, may be seen as manipulative.
• Resolution -Two or even three word links are not at all uncommon, while an entire paragraph of words being used as the text for a link is obviously not meant for better user experience. Avoid stuffing too many keywords into a link, both for your internal navigation, and incoming links from other web sites.
Link schemes are irregular, unnatural and controlled linking patterns or exchange linking methods with the sole purpose of letting participating web sites accumulate page rank. Some link schemes utilize a network of affiliated web sites with all reasons to assume they have been created only to support others with references (and no other purpose), with no actual unique content, no visitors or outside references, or redirect chains to obtain traffic and/or page rank.
Those web sites eventually will show up in the records for constantly cross-referencing one another. The algorithms were designed to map such link networks, and evaluate them on the basis of how well established the participating web sites are. These networks will sooner or later be flagged as Bad Neighborhoods. Such links are often discarded and the participating web sites might be penalized or even banned from the index.
• Resolution - It is very recommended that you should only exchange links with people and/or businesses that you actually know, which web sites are unique in content and well established. Otherwise you might obtain at a short period a very comfortable PR but latter on you will be completely banned from the index.
Google recommends not to purchase links or link packages from any SEO provider. A good and honest SEO provider will advise how to properly obtain a link exchange network that will only bring positive results not only to you but to your affiliates as well. As an example, If you have a web site that sells computer parts you could certainly exchange links with other businesses that offer computer repair.
It is also very important that the web sites you are exchanging links with should be in the same area of business, these are called quality links, one quality link worth more then hundreds of generic links. Exchanging links with all your vendors or partners is the best way to go, and will very unlikely be mapped as a scheme even if you are only looking to accumulate page rank.
If you are not willing to exchange links with web sites in the same area of business because you are afraid that you will loose your customers and you are currently getting a considerable amount of business from your web site as is, you have basically two choices. One would be as describe above under "How to Obtain External Links" and the other one would be exchanging links with businesses that you know, with good standing web sites, in other areas of the market. Usually a large amount of those links will worth less then a couple of quality links but will certainly help you as long as you are in a good standing neighborhood.
I believe that right now you can assume by yourself that search engine optimization takes time. And yes, you are right. Results are not obtained in less then 4 months and it might take up to a year. And there is absolutely no way around this. Any offer of short term SEO should be dismissed.
I also know that Google and Yahoo, as well as most of crawlers, give more importance to older web sites then to new ones. Web sites that have been out there for several years are proof of success so why shouldn't they be more valuable on a search result? Unfortunately we cannot predict exactly how long it will take for a page to obtain a high rank or even if it will ever get there, but I would not be afraid to say that aging is the most important factor on a PR value.
This is where Trust Rank comes around. Trust rank is a major factor that now replaces page rank as the flagship of parameter groups in the Google algorithm. (And a similar system is being used by Yahoo! as well). It is of key importance for calculating ranking positions of web sites and it may also extend the grace period before penalties for accessibility and usability problems take place.
Trust rank is a confidential rating method so there is no public information for its score of a web site or domain, the only indications of trust are what you can perceive from a user point of view. Trust rank technology identifies web sites that have been an important resource on the Internet for a long time, web sites that are seen as authorities of a certain area of interest and that are historically spam and error free, promoted or maintained by a service that is seen less or nearly completely unlikely to show offensive material.
The trust rank technology uses the most reliable network of references, and is, just like page rank, relying on links for many of its calculations, but also includes a lot of other factors that are next to impossible to be manipulated. Major portals, reference pages, national and international communities, long time conventional media publishers, governmental and educational pages, official pages of institutes, organizations, nonprofit organizations and the longest standing commercial web sites are among those that have been set or voted into the position of being a trust rank hub. Those are mainly non-profit web sites that provide good quality and clean service for people every day. Therefore, Trust Rank is not to be considered on a search engine optimization service and is mentioned here for information purpose only.
Note that trust rank is also implemented by human reviews, and that both positive and negative trust, while can be accumulated automatically over time, can be and is sometimes overruled by manual evaluation. Trust can be lost if abused, and distrust can be restored with correcting problems and optionally a goodwill request for re-evaluation.
As your web site accumulates more references to it from other web sites, its trust rank will also build gradually. Once your web site is perceived as a trusted resource for specific queries (queries with keyword phrases), it will most likely appear on the search results for generic queries as well (queries with a single keyword only). Most searches with specific keywords require only a minimum amount of trust rank, while some closely monitored, highly competitive queries with single keywords show only the most trusted results.
When a web site's page rank reaches around 7 it will be eventually human evaluated for trust rank position. At this point, presenting a good design, with descent navigation menus, without hidden content or tricks neither pop up ads with Spyware and Trojans, without bad reviews on major governmental complaint web directories and without visible page rank manipulation will be a very important factor to allow you keep growing on the internet directories. It will also depend on how many trustable administrators Google or Yahoo can include in their team to get this enormous job done, and done right. And as long as a crawler keeps on returning good results to its daily users, it will be standing as a good resource, otherwise, users might start migrating to other crawlers in order to find quality material.