How To Improve Page Rank: 6 Steps for Law Firms
If you can improve your Page Rank by even one or two levels, your website could see increases in both traffic and advertising revenue. If you want to know how to improve your Page Rank, though, you'll probably see a lot of different—and sometimes contradictory—advice from different sources. Here in this guide, you'll get unbiased advice about how to improve Page Rank without sacrificing your website's overall quality.
How to Improve Page Rank Step 1: Better Hosting
You may think that your quest to improve your Page Rank begins when you upload your website's content to the internet. However, even before you create the first page of your website, there are things that you can do to make sure it will be easier to improve your Page Rank.
A good hosting provider is one that has good uptime, low latency, and high speed. You'll want to base your hosting package on the needs of your law firm, but many firms find that they are better served by having an entire server than by using shared hosting solutions. You should also make sure that there are both on and offsite backups of all of your website's files, in case they were ever to become corrupted or otherwise lost. Downtime can decrease a website's Page Rank very rapidly, so to improve your Page Rank you will need to keep your website up consistently.
Google actually bases some of your search engine rankings on whether your web pages can load fast. When you make it easier to improve your Page Rank through fast hosting, you'll also be ensuring that your pages appear earlier in search results.
How to Improve Page Rank Step 2: Site Indexing
Another way that you can improve the Page Rank of your website is by making sure that all of the links on your site are properly indexed by Google. One of the fastest and best ways to do this is to build a site index. Google and Bing list their requirements for site index listings on their respective websites. Once you've built an index according to their guidelines, you can submit the index, which makes it substantially easier for search engines to list all of your content in searches faster.
Even with site indexing, it's important to remember that it will take time to improve the page rank for each of the individual web pages you've listed. Make sure that you're giving these pages adequate time to be indexed by Google so they can receive hits.
How to Improve Page Rank Step 3: Original Content
One of the best ways to make sure that your website is getting the biggest boost possible from every new page you create is making sure that your pages have original content. You shouldn't copy freely from other websites and expect for your site to become highly ranked—Google makes it very hard to improve your Page Rank without showing a large percentage of original content.
While your content should be search engine optimized and follow basic standards for keyword density, it's also important to build inbound links to your website. Inbound linking, especially if the inbound links are themselves from quality original content, will do a great deal to improve your Page Rank overall. Any guide that tries to tell you how to improve Page Rank without using quality content is probably trying to sell you on a short term solution, but you need to think about the long term.
How to Improve Page Rank Step 4: Follow Guidelines
Keeping updated about webmaster guidelines for the search engines you're submitting your website to is an important part of making sure that your Page Rank is as high as it can possibly be. If you don't follow webmaster guidelines, in the very worst case, you could actually end up de-listed from a search completely because of efforts to improve your Page Rank by buying links.
Most offenses won't get you de-listed, but they can lead to search penalties. If you're penalized, some or all of your links may no longer contribute any amount of authority to your website. In order to improve your Page Rank after you've received penalties, you'll usually need to contact Google and show them that you have stopped any violations that you had previously been accused of.
How to Improve Page Rank Step 5: Social Networks
Social networking is one of the best ways to improve Page Rank today. That's because onb social networks, it's incredibly easy for people to share any content that they find interesting or exciting. If you post something to a Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter account, for example, you may find that it was shared by several people—and that then, several friends of those people shared the content as well.
This kind of spread is called “viral” because when it's done right, the content spreads almost like an epidemic, from one person to another. Attorneys should be trying to promote viral marketing wherever possible for their law firms, because this is the updated version of the “word of mouth” referral that used to bring in the bulk of new legal clients to law firms.
Whenever you make posts to social networks, you're increasing the number of views on your pages as well as the number of inbound links going to them, which are two of the biggest factors in how to improve Page Rank. Keep in mind that fresh, original content is much more likely to go viral than a stale rehash or a copied article.
How to Improve Page Rank Step 6: Analyzing Results
You can't really improve your Page Rank efficiently until you've tried a few methods and determined which is actually working for your website. You should analyze your Page Rank historically, using a tool like SEOMoz, and then determine which of your strategies for improving Page Rank numbers has seemed to garner the most benefit.
