Google is changing their algorithm constantly and their algorithm will never be accessible fully by the public to protect against competition and abusers.

The best thing to do for you as a webmaster?  Create great content and focus only on content.  As long as you have great content, Google algorithm will find you.

For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.

via Google Blog

Well, I did a post on how to protect yourself from Pagerank before, now I will tell you how to protect yourself losing Pagerank through “Link Smarts”.

What are “Link Smarts”?

Basically, Google algorithm has been built to award sites with lots of links coming in and less going out.

You need to be very careful about giving out links on your blogroll especially if your blog is established.

Why?

Well let’s say you trade 10 blog links to 10 blogs with PR3 and your blog has PR4.  That’s not going to help you get a higher PR.

FYI, you need to trade blog links with other blogs that have at least the same Pagerank as you do.  Otherwise, you are really shooting yourself in the foot and your Pagerank will decrease over time.

Sounds simple but do you actually do it?

Well, I have to admit that I did trade blogrolls in the past very freely.  This is actually good if your blog is new.  But once you get to a certain point, you need to re-organize your blogrolls and make sure everyone in your blogroll is linking back to you.  Don’t link to someone just because they are famous, you are not helping yourself.

Another Tip

Try to trade blogrolls with other blogs with the same ‘niche’ topic as you are in.  The more related, the merrier.

Now, if you follow the above tips, you should start rising slowly with your Pagerank and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog!

A lot of SEO companies, especially those that have been around for while, will sell you SEO services with promise to get you on the first page of Google.

What those SEO companies really do is buy links for you and re-sell them to you at higher price.  Now, if those are lifetime links, it might be okay but if they are not, you are screwed.

Although I am not a total expert as I am not a solely SEO guy, I can tell you from my experiences blogging that PageRank is something you can’t buy.

Of course, you can go out there and buy some text links from such companies as TLA or other text link brokers, but this is like putting cocaine in your body.

Why?

Think of it this way. Everytime you snort those drugs, it will get you high for a short period of time, as soon as you your high is gone, you are worse off than you were before.

SEO is the same thing. Google doesn’t rank you because you have so many links coming in, their algorithm constantly changes to give users “the best content” when a user types in some keywords. You can buy links but how long is that going to last? Even if you did have millions of dollars, you are basically throwing all of that into the toilet the minute you start hyping up your blog or website with “text link” steroids.

So how do you go about it?

Here’s some guidelines that can help you get higher PageRank and also get #1 on Google for your target keywords:

1.Don’t buy text-links. Network with bloggers in the same topic as yours and “trade” blogrolls.

That’s right. Blogrolls are probably the most often overlooked free links you can get. Blogrolls are great because you are usually dealing with your blogger friends, who are trying to achieve the same goals as you are. And, they won’t spam their own site for those reasons.

Every time you communicate with another blogger, whether that IM, Entrecard, or whatever, see if you can get him to trade blogrolls with you.

This is probably the most important step for you to take right now, especially if your blog is brand new and your PageRank is zero.

Even if you trade blogrolls with PR0 blogs, you might find yourself lucky one day if your blogger friend gets PR6.

Everytime you write a post on your blog, you send out “pings” to Technorati and other blog ping services. (These are great for backlinks by the way.)

Now, if you had blogrolls made of 30 “blogroll trades”, everytime your blogger friend writes a post, you get “pinged”! (That’s 30 backlinks if every one of your blogger friends posted 1 article per day.)

2. Content is King. Write great articles that will interest people to read your blog or website.

From what I’ve seen, no matter how poor your PR is, if your content is good, people will read and your PageRank will go up. (because people will link to you)

Another thing, great articles are good but you need to post daily to get more PageRank.

Quality is probably more important than quantity if you want more readers.

Quantity, on the other hand, can get you more traffic faster.

Quality is great but if you only post 1 article per day, each with 10 tags, that’s the density of your keywords and tags read by Google and other search engines.

But let’s say you write 10 articles per day, each again with 10 tags. That’s about 10 times more tags. Tags are probably more important than anything else these days.

I find that Google indexes your content and later discards most of it when your post gets older and older but Google keeps the tags.

Anyways, the most important part is that you write great content, and the more posts, the merrier.

If you have a long article, try to break them down into 2-3 posts. That way, you will get more traffic in the long run AND your article is still quality first.

3. Link a lot to active bloggers who respond back to you

That right, you want to link to active bloggers who are likely link back to you.

For example, you find a blog post that you find interesting on the web, you link to it and write a blog post.

The blog you linked to blogs back in return.

Pretty simple but if you do this more and more daily, you will get lots of more links and more blogger friends who will help you in the long run.

Next time, we will go into more depth on how you can get your blog or website to be #1 on Google for your target keyword.

In this special post, we will tell you how you can increase your PageRank!

NOTE: Although we admit that there are many “standardized” methods, this method was learned through experience and actual trial-and-error by SEO experts at Zedomax Network.

So here’s your TOP5 List of Things to do and watch for when trying to increase your PageRank:

1. Link to high PR blogs and sites. (In other words, linking massively to websites with high PageRanks is a very good thing) Install the Google Toobar if you don’t know what PageRank is. (It’s that little bar that says PageRank.)

2. BE VERY AWARE OF incoming comments, pings, and trackbacks from other blogs and social networking sites.

In other words, you have to only let “real” blogs and “real” websites link to you. If you have any doubt the sites is a splog (spam blog), or a scraper site, you will want to not let that person, blog, or website leave any trace behind.

3. Google Algorithm is simple. The more links you have coming in, the better. The more links you have going out to high PRs, the better.

This is slightly different from the conventional, “the number of links coming in divided by the number of links going out.” Google somehow ranks you higher if you link to high PR sites and this is what “we” learned through time and trial/error.

Even splogs can help your PageRank as long as you are not linking back to them.

4. Write posts on recent “big” event that’s considered brand new. Doing this automatically gets you some traffic since it’s something new.

For example, if iPod just came out and you were the very first blogger who wrote about it, I bet you are still pulling in traffic from Google. This type of “iPod” keyword can easily boost your PageRank and get lots of traffic.

5. Use the above advices today and take action!

How do you know if it’s working? Well, using all the possible measurement systems today, you’d probably still wouldn’t be able to compute it. But, you will start to notice that you start getting more search terms from Google daily. (Yes, that means your PageRank IS going up.)

Higher PageRank = More Traffic

It’s that simple although there are exceptions with some high PR sites that don’t get as much traffic as others. But we theorize that PageRank is directly correlated with Traffic.

Right now, there’s the new project by Google, Knol Project. We will actually doing this on our older brother site, Zedomax.com. We are trying to see if we can show up #1 on Google for “Knol Project” since it’s so new.