While many people in the Search Engine Optimization field predicted that PageRank was dead, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Today, Google has updated Toolbar PageRank values. If your website’s page rank went down, there are some things that you can do to improve your page rank in the future.

Make Sure Your Website Load Time is Decent

Having a really slow website can kill your PageRank because it always puts a damper on the overall user experience. You may need to change your web hosting plan and invest a little more money into your site every month to make sure that it runs faster.

Get Quality Backlinks

Links to your website on other sites are always a good thing. It basically tells Google that other people out there on the internet are appreciating your content and they want to share it with their followers. This will definitely be a good thing for your PageRank. Make sure any links to your website are natural, organic, and on high-quality websites.

Let Google Know What Your Website is About

You want to have clear title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, meta keywords, H1 and H2 text, etc. that lets Google know what kind of content is going to be on your website. This is great for the user as well as he or she will not have to sift through a lot of confusing information to get to the content they want to see on your website. Another great thing to do is to utilize a sitemap on your website. This is a great way to lay out the outline of your website for the search engines.

Create High Quality Content and a Great User Experience

This is the most important thing Google wants you to do by far. If you are creating great, unique, high quality content, people are naturally going to link to your website. If your website is very clearly structured and laid out well, users will have a much better experience. Google’s main goal is to provide internet users with the content they want to see. Instead of focusing a lot of time and resources on building backlinks, the best way to improve your PageRank or search engine listings is to simply devote the time to making your website the best it can possibly be.

Sara Crawford is a freelance writer and internet marketer from Atlanta, Georgia who often blogs for SolutionBuilt, an SEO and digital marketing company in Atlanta.