by Paul Lalley

Created on: June 22, 2008   Last Updated: June 23, 2008

Page rank is everything. Everything! If your site is buried on page 56 of Google's SERPs (search engine results pages) you aren't going to get a lot of foot traffic, even if you're selling the best chocolates in the world at the lowest prices. If your PR isn't up to snuff, you're not going to sell enough. End of story.

But how do you increase your PR without spending a bundle? Well, here are some low and no-cost tips to get your site moving in the right direction.

Tip #1 Drop the SEO Text
The days of SEO text are soooo last millennium. The rules have changed. You can't simply pack every pixel with keywords and expect to show up on page uno of Google's SERPs.

Lose the keyword density formulas and everything you ever knew about keyword density. Yes, placement of keywords in headers "above the fold" on the homepage will help, but the SEO gibberish that passes for text will drop your PR. SEs hate gibberish because it lessens the quality of the search results delivered to users.

Tip #2 Keep it Fresh
Google spiders your site every two weeks. Yahoo every 48 hours. Each time your site gets spidered, the bot takes a snapshot of your site. If you want to see it, click on the cache' link in your Google listing. That's what the bot saw the last time it stopped by.

Now, when the bot comes back for another visit, it compares the snapshot (cache) to the current site. If nothing has changed in months, you start losing PR points. So add new content every once in while so it looks like your site is active at least to the search engines.

Tip #3 Be Helpful
If you're site is nothing but a links farm, you're not being very helpful to that SE user and that makes SEs mad.

SEs want to see fresh content, but they also want to see helpful, useful informational content, as well. Articles on your products or services. Not sales hype. Good informational copy.

And keep you links in line. If you're selling baseball collectibles but you've got links to gourmet food sites, not good. That link isn't related to your business and it's taking the SE user further away from his or her intended search.

Tip #4 Add a Site Map.
Takes about 10 minutes, but it has a major impact on both your foot traffic and your SE rank.

A site map, accessible to visitors, enables visitors to navigate quickly to the pages they most want to see. Very helpful of you.

But more importantly, SEs spider site maps and are much more likely to pick up changes, and that new content you've been adding, much faster with a site map in place. Ten

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