Many business owners and internet marketing professionals are looking for the fastest way to increase page rank.  In may  respects this is the quest for the holy grail of internet marketing. For those who may not know, page rank is a number assigned by Google according to their secret algorithm that is believed  to be highly relevant to how high a page is placed in the search results. I am here to tell you that the page rank number you can see is certainly not everything when it comes to the ranking  in search results.

In order to see the page rank of a particular web page you must either use a web browser that can display page rank data or go to a site where you can enter the url of a page and get it’s page rank. The problem is that the number you see is always out of date and reflects the last time the public display of  the page rank algorithm was updated. There can be a lag of many months since the last update. So in truth the page rank as used by Google is not accurately reflected in the numbers you can see in many cases.

Despite these problems, page rank is the most visible aspect we have to understand how Google ranks pages in the search results. Please note I said ranks pages, not sites! Each page stands on it’s own to a great extent, though there is some belief that it may be considered in the context of the reputation of the whole site. At the least the page rank of any page can be affected by the page rank of other pages on that site which link to it.

So there is a very simple answer to the question of how to increase page rank rapidly. However, you must first understand what most people think is the basis of page rank. Page rank is in many ways  a popularity contest on the internet. It believed to be based upon the number of links to your page and the popularity of the pages that link to you. In other words the more links, or votes, you get to your site the better in general. The higher the page rank of  the pages that link to you, the more valuable they are to your page rank.

So here is the answer to how to increase page rank rapidly. You have to get as many good quality links to your page that are relevant to the content of your page as you can. It is just that simple. There are many ways to get links including, reciprocal linking  with other sites, posting on blogs and forums, article marketing, and press releases just to name a few.  I believe the most effective is to write articles and submit them to directories for publication distribution.

I will cover each of these methods in some more detail in future articles.