How to increase your Google PR (Page rank)!

[JayJACKEL!]

Attracting links naturally by providing content so interesting or unique that people link to you is the best way to get links. But if most of the threads in SEO forums are any indication, people spend a lot more time on forum posts, blog commenting, article and press release writing than they do on creating compelling content.

I’m not sure why we do this. We know content is king, why do we spend so much time generating backlinks offsite when we could get so many more, higher quality links if we have the right link bait on our site?

Perhaps we just don’t think we’re creative enough to come up with a winning idea. Perhaps we think too big and assume it has to “go viral” to be a success.

Let’s toss some ideas around and see if we can help each other come up with some ideas for link bait. Share an idea or tell us when you last gave away a link and why. Let’s get our creative juices flowing.

Here are some ideas:

-Give away something of value for free (an e-book? a consultation?)
-Be the first to write about news in your field
-Develop a tool and share it
-Interview someone famous in your field and publish the article on your own site
-Get controversial – start a debate
-Run a Contest

What can you add to this list? Can you share a success you’ve had with attracting links naturally? Or something you saw you wish you had thought up yourself? Or an idea that won’t work for your site, but might for someone else’s.

 

[StriderTM]

Thanks for this. Very useful.

 

[Acorn]

Most of our links are reciprocal. You might not believe it, but the Warriors fansite community {which we are part of, being a Warriors site} is actually very competitive. There've been many cases of one site "hacking" another. Of course, most of that hacking is actually just cracking done by kids who somehow got hold of a password.

Still--kids are pretty net-savvy.

So, we don't really have luck with one-way inbound links other than what I make myself, as well as a few of our staff. A couple of blogs have picked us up just as a sort of playful diversion that's animal related, but other than that it's down to my twitter account, my assistant admin's Facebook, a handful of Youtube videos and stuff like that! And some reciprocal links, seen on our affiliates table. We are very low in pagerank--I'll be honest, actually we are a 0 XD But it doesn't seem to really matter--we are ranking decently again {for the time being...} and getting a healthy amount of member activity and signups.

 

[Rich Edmonds]

One must ask themselves (I really am getting tired of saying this), what is more important? Managing your community? Or reading countless posts about Google PR? In fact, I have seen that a good 95% of posts about SEO are done by people who know nothing, but like to repeat what is written in SEO articles, posts and books.

It doesn't matter if your forum is ranking on the first page or not, if it is horrible, your conversion rate will be extremely poor.

 

[Acorn]

Agreed: about 95% of SEO forum posts are worthless junk.

Probably the best way to get that ranking is make sure you have a healthy happy forum community, even if not that big, then once you have this great thing going, encourage your members to invite others, and post the link around if they get the chance to. Google will pick up those links. That's what we did when our forum moved and we lost ALL of our google rank. All of it. But word of mouth, Facebook and more, have all started to get the ball rolling again. And lo and behold we are starting to get up there in google again.