My advice to people seeking to increase search page rank is to reduce focusing on the search engine and focus more on what your prospective clients would want. All the search engine tries to do is provide the pages with the greatest likelihood of what the searcher is seeking. If your site has lots of relevant search accessible content you will place high.

In the distant past (internet time) having lots of links was a successful strategy. But the search engines have become sophisticated and now just having lots of raw or weak links is not a good indicator of site info usefulness or the state of search engine sophistication at this time.

In this thought, would you place a higher rank on a website being useful because there were a large number of MySpace of Facebook links to it? (plus many social network links are no-follow) Probably not, there is no peer expertise behind it, probably just a bunch of friends swapping links. And I think that is likely the way that Google interprets it and therefor would not put much value on social network links that it could follow.

Links are also valued by the content of the pages linking. Meaning if a good page links to your page because of specific relevant content, that can be a highly weighted link. This means that you want a link to reflect the content and context of your site. There is some speculation that linking authoritatively with contextual links to other sites may be helpful for your site. The thinking behind this is that if your site offers additional links that may be helpful to your site visitors, then the search engine might may view your site as more useful and favor it with a higher ranking … who knows. But it can’t hurt to always try to focus on meeting the needs for your target market.

Here are some links to good resources for more info -

This is a good, recent SEO forum discussion regarding which types of links Google appears to have devalued or no longer gives any value. Also has some useful discussion of what links have the most value and how to optimize links.

Similar information with a little more detail as to link value, weight and succesful link management is in this article. Well worth reading. This excerpt points out something that many non-SEO link experts are probably not aware of::

“The biggest way in my opinion to lose link value … is by reciprocal link exchanges. Probably the easiest and worst way to leak link value is by reciprocating with un-related, low quality sites. This can hurt your site and you are likely to lose positions randomly over time… the days of link exchanging for rankings are gone… Only reciprocate with sites who give you a link on a content page and which are relevant, others will greatly dis valued.

The second worst way is site-wide links. These draw value from all your pages and are not a good idea… I would nofollow all sitedwide links or give the webmaster only one link. Sitewide links are also disvalued, I believe how many pages the link is on may play a big role but just the fact that it is a site-wide link seems to be grounds for disvaluing.”

And finally a little more clarification between the old concept of page rank from the number of raw links to the more current concept of link value. It is a short article and also worth a quick read.

Fundamentally, it is all about providing more useful information to you targeted website visitor. Which means you really may pay less attention to the peculiarities of SEO. Just get the structure “right” and then build relevant content. At this time the best way to present sufficient useful content for SEO and your prospective clients is to add a blog (and using it) within your website. Self hosted WordPress works best.

(h/t to Jane Hullick Hart of Sydney Wedding Music for suggesting this post)