Webmaster Tip - Increasing your google page rank

When you are a webmaster increasing your google page rank, or pagerank as it is sometimes spelled, is almost the holy grail. Hours are spent trying to make your page look valuable to the google search engine gods and often it can be a frivolous exercise. Over the next few weeks I am going to include tips on how to increase your google page rank and the first tip starts today!

Tip 1 - Submitting to directories
One of the ways google ranks pages is to look at the quality and number of sites linking back to your website (backlinks). One way to increase your backlinks without pestering webmasters to link back to you is to submit your site to directories. The best thing about directories is that many are absolutely free (for the cheap webmasters like me this is great) and many have a high page rank themselves, which is important for making your site look like a quality page. Basically the higher the page rank of the directory you are listed on the better your page will end up looking. Now I have heard many things about this topic, but I always say you need at least 100 good quality back links before google will take any notice of you.

For the Cheapskates...

If you are going down the free directory route then you have to be prepared for two things:
1. To wait while someone checks your site and decides it is worthy of submission (this can take months).
2. To provide a backlink from your site to the directory.
It is possible that some will not accept you so always submit to more than you want and hope to get over about 100 (more if you are really serious)

I have money what about me?

If you have money for advertising your website (or someone providing a bankroll) then you can consider paying to be listed in directories. The price of this varies and you can find some companies who will do all of the work for a fee. There are two advantages of paying for a listing:
1 You often get a higher listing in the directories themselves
2 You are usually given a listing in the directory within 24 hours

What directories do I submit to?

Well this is up to you, there are literally thousands of the things and some are better than others. You should try submitting to directories with a high page rank (7-10) first and then hit some of the smaller ones (3-6) later. You can also take a gamble and submit to page rank 0 directories in the hope that they will rank better next time around.
You should also consider listing with directories that deal with your specific subject area of your website. For example if you have a golf page you might search google for "golf directory" and find a few directories specific to your topic to submit to.

A good list of directories and their page ranks can be found at:
addurl.nu
However there are thousands more.

Tips
Help I can't find the page rank... If you want to know the page rank of the site you are submitting to simply search google for a" page rank checker" and find out how good the site you are submitting to really is. Anything page rank 3 or over is fine.

How many backlinks do I have?
To check how many backlinks you have you can use the google webmasters tools that I blogged about earlier this week. You can read that post here: Linkback tool at googles webmasters central.
However the quickest and easiest way of doing this would be to perform a google search. Simply type in link: and then the full URL of your website

A word of warning
Don't submit to directories all at once as google gets a little suspicious if your page is nowhere and then it starts turning up all over the place the next day. Space out your submissions over a few weeks and all should be fine.

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