Before going any further you first need to know what your current PageRank is and to find this out you need to install the Google toolbar. This gives the official PageRank of your website. Download Here!

Google Update PageRank only a few times a year which gives you time to work on improving it. To key to getting a higher PageRank is to have back links to your website from other websites that have similar content that also receive high traffic.

There are tools on the web after working to increase your PageRank that you can use to roughly guess what your next PR will be. However these are not always accurate. Try one out here.

If you have a blog and want to increase the PR, try commenting on other blogs that are similar to yours. This will create back links to your website from similar content.

Other steps are to submit your website to online directories. These are free and offer a range of link types so ensure that you choose regular link. Do not just put your links on a couple you need thousands however build these links over a period of time and do not get them all at the same time because this may harm your PageRank.

It becomes harder to get a higher rank as you move up through PageRank. Most websites can easily achieve PR5 by using the methods above.

How does it Work?

PageRank works by deciding that pages with a higher number of links going to them are the more important. As a result they are listed further up search results. There is another factor to PageRank and this is that it is not only the amount of links that is taken into consideration.

PageRank also analyses the webpage on which the link to the website is placed. This is why it is important to get back links to your website, from websites that have related content to you.

PageRank is ultimatly designed to find websites that appear to be the best source of information to the user. By looking at the number of incoming links to a web page, PageRank states that this page is therefore useful.

Webmasters can manipulate PageRank in their favour by trying to force more links to their web pages. Too many incoming links from websites that are unrelated to your content may damage your websites PageRank.

How do I check my websites PageRank?

The most accurate way to check your websites PageRank is by using the Google Toolbar. A websites PageRank is measured between PR0 and PR10. There is a very small number of websites with PageRank 10. Each page on a website has a PageRank, not just the website as a whole.

I will not go into how to increase your PageRank here, I will save that for another day.