If you're even the slightest bit interested in Internet Marketing or making money online, then you'll be aware of Google's page rank as a measure of a website's importance. And, if you're a follower, then you're probably aware that Google recently did a page rank update, which was good news for some and not-so-good news for others. Now, I haven't been creating websites for years (only a few months, as a matter of fact), so I was more than gratified to see that most of my sites now have a page rank of 4. The biggest surprise, however, was discovering that a website of mine that's just five weeks old now has a page rank of 4.

My domain, waystoworkfromhome.com was officially registered in June 4th, 2006 and I added a bunch of articles to it over the next week. Now, the home page and most of those initial ten articles (as well as my sitemap) all have a page rank of 4 (some newer pages, which I added in the week or so before the page rank update are still PR0).

Now that you've got the background, we'll get into the meat of the article, and that's how I achieved a page rank of 4 for a brand new website in just a few short weeks. One very important way of achieving a good page rank, is to get good quality backlinks to your sites, and here's where many people falter. They don't know where to get good links, so engage in reciprocal linking, or join FFA sites or link exchange sites to get the links they need. However, most of these sites involve reciprocal linking, and Google's getting wise to reciprocal linking strategies. For this reason, reciprocal links aren't worth nearly as much to a site as one way backlinks. So, how do you go about getting enough one way backlinks to get a good page rank in a fairly short amount of time?

Step 1. Firstly I have to give credit to my membership in a program called Article Underground, which I was fortunate to discover back in late February. I can't give away all the details, suffice to say they have an excellent system in place for getting one way backlinks to a site. I should warn you, however, that this service is only for people creating pure "white hat" content sites, not "black hat" portal or scraper sites.

Step 2. The next step in my campaign to get backlinks involves submitting my website to directory sites. This can be a time consuming process, but I've recently purchased some software called SubmitEaze, which makes the process a great deal simpler. It still takes time, but it's time definitely well spent.

Step 3. Basically what I'm doing now, that is, writing articles and submitting them to article directory sites. In the resource box of each article you write, you should include a link to your website. That way, whenever a publisher picks up and uses your article, you'll get an immediate backlink to your site. Of course, you don't have any control over where your sites get published, but many people who have used this strategy have had fantastic results, and now have single articles spread right across the Internet.

So there you have it! Three simple steps to help increase your page rank. You'll notice that I didn't pay for any links (although it is a popular way of getting one way links from high PR sites), and I didn't use any spamming techniques to do it. Of course, a page rank of 4 is not mind blowingly high, but for a five week old site, I'm not complaining.