I have a site dedicated to my photography. It has lots of galleries, with thousands of photos. There isn't a lot of text though, in comparison to all those photos. (Perhaps that is part of the issue here?) I have what I think is a decent Alexa rank for a photographer's web site: #563,958 I've compared it to many other photographer's web sites, and their Alexa rank is usually much lower. I even rank much higher than many famous photographers, and I'm certainly no one famous. I know that a competitive Alexa ranking certainly doesn't mean everything, but it makes me feel like I'm at least doing something right. As for Google page rank though, I have a big fat ZERO. I've always heard that getting back links was a key to getting a decent page rank. If I check for links to my site using Google Webmaster Tools, it finds over a 1,000 links. It's not like there aren't links to my site scattered around the internet, and Google obviously knows about these links, since Webmaster Tools can find them... However, if I go to the Google search engine and type in "link:MyDomain.com" Google suddenly says there are no links at all to my site! So, first of all, should I worry that my page rank is currently zero? If I should worry, what are the first steps to improving the rank? By the way, this site has probably been online for about 3 years, but I've only really tried to promote the site seriously in the last several months. Could that be part of the PR problem? thanks in advance for any advice, Glen
Well if you want to prmote your website so that more and more visitors can visit your website then you must undertake on-page and off-page SEO. being a SEO expert and providing services to many clients, I myself is running many websites and doing SEO work.
For some odd reason Google's "link:url" doesn't always match up to webmasters tools, so it's unreliable in my opinion. What you need to do is make sure you provide enough information for your content. As in make sure your images have a alt tag. Build back links that is in your niche and a bit above your current rank. What I'll do is look for top-quality back links for a month or two that are PR 1 but stay under 40ish links, aftrer that i'll do it on PR 2 but cut in halfish of what i did last time and etc. Hope this helps.
Thanks, aleale and WhosJose. You've both provided me a few useful tips. Now, for a real newbie question. What's a good way to go about getting back links that help with PR? Like I said, I have several links already, but apparently Google didn't care much about those. Practically every forum and website I'm a member of has links pointing to my website. It's there in my member profile, and if the site allows it, it appears in all my forum postings in the form of a signature line. Do those types of links help with Google PR? Do I have to start specifically asking related sites with good PR to link to me?
Well, urm this is a tough one to be honest. I think I'll use search engines and see what I find deep in the list(30+ page). You simply need to remember the common rules 1) Always stay on topic, even if you are leaving a simple comment for a unknown blog always stay on topic. 2) Make sure you provide detailed information 3) Stay unique 100% 4) Fail a few times - don't get me wrong noone want's to fail but after a few wrong turns you will be get better. Trust me it happens to all! From my understanding, Google is now removing/decreasing the amount of rank it gave to forum signatures, and stuff like that. I've also heard in some cases it can also improve, I still use it to be honest, but I don't worry about it nor do I keep an eye on it; if it comes it comes with sigs. You always need to ask for related sites when you are doing link exchange. You don't want your site to be advertising on a site that is based on jeans when your site is based on fishes.
Going through the whole part it really seems that you haven't made any optimization yet for your website. So to get quality backlinks which may assist you to get Pr and drag traffic you need to optimize you sites, starting doing its SEO by today onwards.