How to improve page rank is a common question from webmasters. It’s natural, since search engines are a practically limitless source of free traffic. That assumes that your pages rank well in the results though, because no one clicks through to page 45 to find a site. There are many common problems made by those trying to improve page rank, and today we’ll take a look at some of the worst.
1) Ignoring link text – all incoming links are good for your page rank, but a link that has text which is relevant to your site and relevant to the page it is linking to will have much more impact. When campaigning for links, it’s critical to maximize the quality and value of each one by using relevant keyword phrases in the links.
2) Too many outgoing links – each page on a website has a certain amount of voting power that it can spread around. It can use that power to vote for pages on your site, or it can use that power to vote for external sites. Every link that goes off site is draining page rank or votes that could be used to boost the ranking of your own pages. You don’t need to eliminate all outgoing links, but try to keep them in check.
3) Linking out from high ranking pages – the amount of voting power that a page is related to how important that page is, or how high it ranks. High ranking pages have a lot of voting power. External links from high ranking pages cost you much more of your overall page rank than links from lower power pages. Funneling your links from higher ranked pages back into your own site is your best bet.
4) Insufficient link diversity – having a million links from your own sites won’t do nearly as much for your page ranking as having links from a variety of sites. Different web hosts, different geographical locations, different site platforms (Wordpress, Blogger, etc), different IPs. The more diversity you have in your incoming links, the better off you’ll be.
Next time you’re thinking about how to improve page rank, remember that while getting links is a good thing, you’ll want to avoid these mistakes to maximize your ranking.