Page Rank (PR) is a measure used by Google to determine the importance of a webpage. Contrary to popular belief, Page Rank is unique only to Google. No other search engines use PR to determine the websites importance in any way.
Increasing PR is quite a simple process, but before we start, let us look at what an increase in PR can do for you:
1. Increase in PR increases your importance online.
2. Increased PR makes you rank higher in the organic search results (for Google)
3. Pages with a higher PR are crawled more often by spiders. Pages with Pr 7+ are crawled many times a day!
4. Because you rank high when your PR is high, you get more traffic.
Now that we understand the benefits, the two simple ways to increase PR are:
1. Put up new content consistently on your webpage – content is king!
2. Get more links to your webpage.
Webmasters as well as SEO companies have mentioned link building as the most important process in order to increase your PR. I personally think putting up new content increases your PR even more quickly.
Rather than paying SEO companies to increase your PR (as a lot of people do), you can do so yourself by providing new content to the search engines. I have managed to get my blog up to PR 3 in only 1 month by writing one article everyday. I do not have more than 20 links pointing to my blog. This proves that even though links are important in increasing PR, content is always king.
But the Page Rank assigned to you is always lagging. For example, it is widely believed that PR for webpages is updated once every 1-3 months. So do not expect to get your PR increase by writing 10 articles in 10 days, as you need to give Google more time to index your content and links and assign you a Page Rank.
An important point here is that PR in itself does not help you get more traffic. Some people assume that if your PR is above a certain threshold (i.e. PR 6), they will receive a lot of traffic. Although that could happen, it is far more effective to target the keywords you want to rank high for, and then work on the Page Rank.