How Important is PageRank? PageRank is a measure of how popular your site is. The PR of your site is determined by how many other sites link to you.
When crawling a site, the search engine robots will follow the links on a page, unless they are directed by HTML code to ignore the links. Each link they come across that points a site is counted as a vote for that site. These votes tally up to equal the PR for the site. There is much more to it, but in the short version this is the way it works.
Each link to your homepage or another page on your site will add a bit to the PR. The PageRank of the linking site is factored into the formula, so not all votes are equal. It is almost as if the linking site is sharing their PR with you. The higher the PR of the linking site, the more weight their vote carries. This doesn't mean that a link from a PR1 site will somehow hurt your PR as some would have you believe. In general, a link pointing to your site will not reduce your PR.
It is not the same story for outbound links, so be very careful who you link to. Before I get too deep into that, let's take a step back and discuss some common ways sites develop links, then we can cover the pitfalls.
One fairly common method of getting links to your site is through link exchanges. Basically you put a link on your site and another webmaster adds a link to your site on one of their pages. Linking from a page with hundreds or even thousands of unrelated links to your site is not a good plan. The "vote" would be so diluted from the other links so as to be almost meaningless. But more important, if you link back to the other site and that site ends up being "banned" by the search engines, you will be penalized for pointing to a banned site. This will kill your PageRank!
It is a good practice to check all of your linking partners at least monthly to make sure of two important things. First, make sure they are still linking to you. Second, make sure they have not been banned. If you find they have deleted your link, ask them to replace it. However, if the other site has gotten banned, then remove their link from your site as soon as possible. Your site's PR will suffer if you link to a site that has been banned.
Linking is an important SEO strategy and as long as you keep an eye on your link partners it makes sense to exchange links. Here is a better plan to put in place, generate one way links back to your site. These are links that other sites put up that point to your site without you having to link to them. There are many ways to develop these one way links. Remember, they can never hurt you because, in theory, you have no control over them. below are four quick tips to get one-way links.
1. Post comments on public forums, articles, blogs, etc. with a link to your site.
2. Submit your original content to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Technorati, or any of the hundreds of other social sites on the net.
3. Submit articles on your topic to article databases and include a link to your site in the article resource box.
4. Pay for them. Although this is not my favorite way to develop them, it is available.
When you develop a linking strategy and stick to it you will quickly develop more links to your site than you would think. This will not only increase your PageRank, it will increase the overall traffic to your site.
