Google is the leading search engine, so having a good strategy for charming the Google spiders is very important if you wish to improve your page ranking.

Free-For-All Sites

FFAs or free-for-all sites are sites where there are dozens of outbound links to various people’s websites. There’s nothing wrong with one of these sites linking to you, but it is very bad news for your page rank if you link to them. Google recognises that you have no control over who links to you, but you certainly do have control over the sites that link to you. Therefore you need to make sure that you screen the sites you link to very carefully, and avoid any of these sites which have huge numbers of links unrelated to one another, and which seem to serve no purpose except that of displaying dozens of links. If you do link to one of these sites, you’ll get "blacklisted" by Google, and it can be extremely difficult to persuade Google that you’re a reformed character.

Average Page Rank and Link Dilution

The average page rank of a group of pages is always 1. This means that outgoing links will reduce your page rank, whilst incoming links will raise your page rank. For every highly ranked page, there is a page ranked much lower. Therefore the higher-ranking the sources of your incoming links are, the more valuable those links are to you.

Also, the more outgoing links on a page, the less those links are worth. A page with just one link to another page transfers far more page rank value to that other page than a page with hundreds of links to hundreds of pages. It is also possible that Google favours links placed higher up on a page.

SEO Content

Search engine optimised content is extremely important for optimisation. This is keyword rich, relevant, real-life readable-by-humans copy.

Anchor Text

The anchor text of incoming links to your site is very important. If your site is about Domain Names, the anchor text of a link to your site should ideally be "domain name registration" or "domain names", rather than "John Smith’s Domains". Google will then make a link between your site and the keywords " Domain Name Registration", which is very valuable.

You should pounce on any offers of links from other people’s sites, and of course you should also let them know exactly how you would like your link to appear.