Let me preface this by saying, I know how everyone on the discussioni boards is going to tell me that PR is not necessarily a ‘true’ reflection of one’s site quality (don’t know if ‘quality’ is the best word for it).
In any case, I have several sites that are currently have a Page Rank of 4, however, the jump from 4 to 5 seems to be the biggest one I’ve faced yet.
I hate to get ahead of myself, calling this move from 4-5 the biggest one I’ve encountered yet, however, my sites have remained at this integer longer than any other, as of yet.
Let me reiterate, I understand that from a programming/design perspective, PR may seem inconsequencial, however, clients love it, and therefore I’m embracing it as a worthwhile venture.
So FINALLY, my question is:
Does anyone have any additional suggestions or good recipes to help me make this jump?
P.S. I apologize for the ambiguity of this inquiry, however, it is sort of an abstract topic.
Focus on serps and traffic resulting then conversion or whatever your goal. PR is good for measuring your hard work and also getting the attention of competitors
PageRank is purely a measurement of the number and nature of backlinks to a page (or ‘site’ if you’re referring to the home page).
PageRank is also roughly logarithmic in scale, meaning that going from PR4 to PR5 is going to be much harder that going from PR3 to PR4. This image might illustrate better:
You’ve got to make a site that is viral, a site that people love so much that they visit again and again, tell their fiends, and create links to it because they feel inclined without prodding by you. Doing that is no simple task, but when you find the secret, which is different for each person, you will see true magic happen. I have been lucky enough to be involved in a number of such occurrences, as well as lots of projects that didn’t make it as well. You just have to find a way to be brilliant. Good luck!
You should really try hard to educate your clients about the value of other metrics, otherwise I reckon you’ll have an ongoing battle with them.
If you reinforce their belief in the value of PR, won’t they just want more? They’ll want you to get their site to be PR5, then 6, then 7 and they’ll want you to explain why a competitor’s PR4 site outranks their PR6 site (especially after spenind all that time and money getting to PR6).
IMO the only people that should spend considerable time and effort on building PR (and keeping a count of it) are those who sell links on their sites. Because that’s the default metric for valuing a paid link.
Exactly - Google has something in the region of 200 factors that it considers, and PR is only one of them. Worrying about PR when there are other things you could improve first is totally backwards!