Now, obviously a "good" site links to you, it will have a better effect on your website's popularity. Say, for example, a PR 3 website puts a link on their links page to your main page. That link will be considered a PR 2 link to your site (PR - 1), giving you a PR of 2 on your main page. If, however, a PR 0 site adds a link to your site, there is almost no change. A link from a grayed-out site, which means they have a negative PR, will actually be a detriment to your PR, as they have been deemed a site not relevant to anything (or relevant, but banned) by Google. Of course, a link from a PR 7 site to your own will be drastically more effective in boosting your PR than even 20 PR 3 links would.

Getting Good Links

One of most important things to remember about getting a high PR ranking is to get links from "good" sites. These include sites that are directly related to your own site in some way, and preferably sites with a high PR of their own. Good examples include award pages and directory listings. With relevant links coming from related sites with a high PR, your site will not only gain PR fast, but will gain in real popularity. High PR sites traditionally have high traffic due to their link volume and content. If there is a link to you, it is a sign that you have a good site on a related topic with good content as well, attracting visitors who didn't find exactly what they wanted. More visitors means more PR, which in turn gets you more visitors. You can see how important good links can be.

Try to steer away from sites with unrelated topics, as these will probably not help much, if any with your traffic, and may actually bring a penalty to your PR. Other sites to steer away from when trying to work up your PR would be FFAs, or Free For All link programs. These sites allow browsers to enter their link into a huge list (sometimes of thousands of other sites). Usually you will find that these sites have been "grayed out," or given a negative PR effect by Google, bringing your PR down if you have a link from them.

Doorway pages are another thing to avoid. These are shorter, shallow sites that are created simply for putting as many keywords and links as possible on their pages in order to "farm" PR for higher rankings on Google. These, in general, once they are found are "grayed out," as well as sites they link to. Enough links from these will assure that your site will not show up on Google's search at all.

Getting Good Content

Good, original content is not as hard to obtain as some might think. By writing articles for your site you can provide pages of completely relevant and unique content, as long as articles are on subject. A few articles will give you plenty of original content to get a fairly good "relevance rating" with Google, which contributes to your PR rating, and it will not trigger dreaded "duplicate content" tag that will doom your site to obscurity.

In addition, if you can get enough relevant content together, you can eventually become recognized as an "expert" in field. With that status, you will get enough traffic to boost your PR even more. People are always in need of information, and if you provide good enough information, you will find yourself getting links from all over internet.

PR in a Nutshell - an Overview

Basically, with enough unique content and relevant links, you can have a high PR site and be ready to take on internet. Overall, things to keep in mind are to stay consistent with your main topic, both in links and in your content, and stay away from "no-no" sites mentioned above. If you can do these things, you can gain a high PR and a good ranking with Google in a relatively short period of time.

Build a Forum

Forum is another great way to build up your website. Forum will provide you with fresh content as well as visitors that will be coming back to discuss industry related topics on your forum. Forum is very difficult to get started but once you are able to get enough members to post regularly, you will enjoy daily fresh content with no effort on your part.

There are a lot of forum platforms out there but my personal favorite is phpBB . It is easy to install and customize. You might also consider using mod_rewrite to make your forums more search engine friendly. More information on how to do that can be found at able2know.com forum .

Start a Blog

Blog has been often regarded as a backdoor to Google. Indeed, whole blog concept is very search engine friendly. Blogs are easy to crawl and they provide fresh content. There is no way you should disregard this advantage. Start your own blog right on your authority website, discuss industry related topics and make sure to post something at least on weekly basis if not on daily. Google and other search engines will reward you for fresh content by giving you better ranking.

Create Link Directory

There are several benefits in building your own link directory. First, by requiring reciprocal link during submission you will build up backlinks from other websites in your industry. Second, you will build up number of pages on your website. Each business will probably submit a description along with link and that description will most likely contain keywords related to your website. That means that you will instantly generate pages with keywords that you are interested in. One of my favorite directory scripts is Hot Links SQL . Unlike many directory scripts out there, this one generates static pages for categories as well as details pages for every website listed in your directory.