Every now and then webmasters ask how can I increase my PageRank? The reason they ask is because the more the PageRank, the more are the chances for your content/page to get included higher in the Search Results, resulting in more traffic. The PageRank is a computed by Google using a proprietary algorithm and Google keeps on tweaking it to make it better all the time. However there are some of the very common factors that PageRank is determined on.
<!--break-->PageRank Factors
Some of the various common factors that effect page rank are:
* Relevance. This is one of most important factor in addition to 200 hundred other data points Google Search Engine relies on. The website content has to match as close as to what the search is about. So websites that provide niche content would be favored then sites providing general or content covering diverse topics.
* Comprehensiveness. Today Google indexes billions and billions of webpages, and its index is roughly 100+ million gigabytes. So search now is more comprehensive as it cut through images, videos, news, books and more as it determines the search results, so make sure your other assets are also described and are SEO compliant to get the maximum benefit.
* Freshness. Googlebots crawls once or several times daily depending on site content publishing rate so that it can include the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even seconds after they’re posted, so keep the doing good quality work and roll out as soon as you can.
* Speed. Speed is a major search priority, the users these days are cannot wait longer, they quickly jump from one site to another if your site is slow and Google can sense the same, so make sure your site response time is the fastest as it can. This can be dealt with caching, better hosting , different layout and other factors.
Webmaster's, based on your experience, if there are more elementary factors, please leave as a comment for the same.
[Update]
When I was searching for more information about PageRank I came across this FAQ from Google Webmaster Forums.
Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only
update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this
is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is
just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled,
indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just
because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If
you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check out Analytics,
think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or
other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your
website or business.
I think this is quiet true based on my experience, what do you guys think?