<p>In SEO people talk a lot about Google <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PageRank</a>. It's kind of a catch 22 because until your site is actually big and you don't really need search engines as much, it's unlikely that big sites will link to you and increase your PageRank!</p>

<p>I've been told that it's easiest to simply get a couple high quality links to point to a site to raise it's PageRank. I've also been told that there are certain Open Directories like dmoz.org that Google pays special attention to (since they're human managed links). Can anyone speak to the validity of this or suggest another site/technique to increase a site's PageRank?</p>

[{'answer_id': 58486, 'author': 'Edward Wilde', 'author_id': 5182, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5182', 'pm_score': 6, 'selected': True, 'text': '<h2>Have great content</h2>\n<p>Nothing helps your google rank more than having <strong>content</strong> or offering a service people are interested in. If your web site is better than the competition and solves a real need you will naturally generate more traffic and inbound links.</p>\n<h2>Keep your content fresh</h2>\n<h2>Use friendly url\'s that contain keywords</h2>\n<p><strong>Good</strong>: <a href="http://cars.com/products/cars/ford/focus/" rel="noreferrer">http://cars.com/products/cars/ford/focus/</a></p>\n<p><strong>Bad</strong>: <a href="http://cars.com/p?id=1232" rel="noreferrer">http://cars.com/p?id=1232</a></p>\n<h2>Make sure the page title is relevant and well constructed</h2>\n<p><strong>For example</strong>: Buy A House In France :. Property Purchasing in France</p>\n<h2>Use a domain name that describes your site</h2>\n<p><strong>Good</strong>: <a href="http://cars.com/" rel="noreferrer">http://cars.com/</a></p>\n<p><strong>Bad</strong>: <a href="http://somerandomunrelateddomainname.com/" rel="noreferrer">http://somerandomunrelateddomainname.com/</a></p>\n<p><strong>Example</strong>\nType car into Google, out of the top 5 links all 4 have car in the domain: <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=car" rel="noreferrer">http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=car</a></p>\n<h2>Make it accessible</h2>\n<p>Make sure people can read your content. This includes a variety of different audiences</p>\n<ul>\n<li><p>People with disabilities: Sight, motor, cognitive disabilities etc..</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Search bots</p>\n<p>In particular make sure search bots can read every single relevant page on your site. Quite often search bots get blocked by the use of <strong>javascript</strong> to link between pages or the use of frames / <strong>flash</strong> / <strong>silverlight</strong>. One easy way to do this is have a site map page that gives access to the whole site, dividing it into categories / sub categories etc..</p>\n</li>\n<li><p>Down level browsers</p>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<h2>Submit your site map automatically</h2>\n<p>Most search engines allow you to submit a list of pages on your site including when they were last updated.</p>\n<p>Google: <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html" rel="noreferrer">https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html</a></p>\n<h2>Inbound links</h2>\n<p>Generate as much buzz about your website as possible, to increase the likely hood of people linking to you. Blog / podcast about your website if appropriate. List it in online directories (if appropriate).</p>\n<h2>References</h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href="http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors" rel="noreferrer">Google Search Engine Ranking Factors, by an SEO company</a></li>\n<li><a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522%3E" rel="noreferrer">Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices</a></li>\n<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization" rel="noreferrer">Wikipedia - Search engine optimization</a></li>\n</ul>\n'}, {'answer_id': 58488, 'author': 'Community', 'author_id': -1, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Google doesn't want you to have to engineer your site specifically to get a good PageRank. Having popular content and a well designed website should naturally get you the results you want.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 58509, 'author': 'Christopher Mahan', 'author_id': 479, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/479', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Good content.</p>\n\n<p>Update it often. </p>\n\n<p>Read and digest everything at <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Creating a Google-friendly site: Best practices</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Be active on the web. Comment in blogs, correspond genuinely with people, in email, im, twitter.</p>\n\n<p>I\'m not too sure about the domain name. Wikipedia? What does that mean? Mozilla? What word is that? Google? Was a typo. Yahoo? Sounds like that chocolate drink Yoohoo.</p>\n\n<p>Trying to keyword the domain name shoehorns you anyway. And it can be construed as a SEO technique in the future (if it isn\'t already!)</p>\n\n<p>Answer all email. Answer blog comments. Be nice and helpful.</p>\n\n<p>Go watch <a href="http://twitter.com/garyvee" rel="nofollow noreferrer">garyvee</a>\'s <a href="http://garyvaynerchuk.com/2008/08/12/better-than-zero/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Better Than Zero</a>. That\'ll motivate you.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 58616, 'author': 'harriyott', 'author_id': 5744, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5744', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>If it's appropriate, having a blog is a good way of keeping content fresh, especially if you post often. A CMS would be handy too, as it reduces the friction of updating. The best way would be user-generated content, as other people make your site bigger and updated, and they may well link to their content from their other sites.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 7057288, 'author': 'magallanes', 'author_id': 202705, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/202705', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>A easy trick is to use</p>\n\n<p>Google webmaster tool  <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools</a></p>\n\n<p>And you can generate a sitemap using  <a href="http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/</a></p>\n\n<p>Then, don\'t miss to use www.google.com/analytics/ </p>\n\n<p>And be careful, most SEO guides are not correct, playing fair is not always the good approach. For example,everyone says that spamming .edu sites is bad and ineffective but it is effective.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/58484', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5642/']