Getting a high ranking in a Search Engine means the difference between a few visitors and 100’s of visitors from Search Engines. With millions of searches a second, Search Engines are one of the most important factors in a Website’s success. Rank should be in turn the most important factor for you when it comes to being listed on Search Engines.
Some search engines such as Google rely on a robot or spider to gather information for their databases. This data is then processed by their systems through a mathematical process called an algorithm, meaning that they rate your site and determine a page’s relevance or importance. How you rate effects your position. This monthly shifting of position is also sometimes referred to as the Google Dance.
This algorithm is kept secret for obvious reasons. It does get revised and changed from time to time to achieve better results. The algorithm looks at several factors to determine your pages importance. One of which are links.
Your page rank gets determined by links pointing to your site. The more links the better the rank. Although it’s a little more complicated than that because each of the pages pointing to your site also has a page rank, and this is taken into consideration too, meaning that a site with a page rank of 5 means more than a link form a page rank of 4 and so on. (This has sometime been estimated as a difference of 100X between PR numbers).
With a Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) you can see your toolbar page rank 0-10. (Actual page rank is measured in billions) This is something to consider before setting up links with another site; make sure the page you are linking too has a similar page rank to the one you are linking from. Make good exchanges. Getting links increase your sites Page Rank, sending links decreases your Page Rank. Even pages within your own site have relevance. Remember that linking is only ONE of the factors in determining your sites relevance.
Other important tips for achieving a good rank are of course content. Mostly it’s better not to try to cheat the search engines: make your content relevant to your keywords for the search. The more content and the more pages you have the better your rank.
Text in a link’s anchor tag is also relevant in your link rating, so make sure that your links have relevance to your Website’s content.
Quality is sometimes better than quantity, although there is importance in having both when it comes to links. The more links that point to you, the more important your Website is seen as. The more links that you get pointing to your site without having to reciprocate them benefits you even more.
