7 Google Alternatives: What Should I Do While Google Ranks My Page?

Have you heard of PageRank? Do you own a website? Do you spend time trying to get your site seen by the Google Search Engine? It can be a little long and frustrating trying to improve your search results.

How long does Google take to increase your PageRank? Even if you've done everything you should, it can be a while! To be fair though, the folks at Google have a lot of websites to look at. Was it 1.5 billion at the last count? That's a lot of pages! Google has to work out the PageRank for each one.

Don't lose heart though. There are a lot of things you can do to make this process a little less painful. And they don't all involve setting your goal and then sitting back and meditating!

In this page we'll talk about some things that you can do while waiting for Google. You can even vote for your favorite Google Alternatives!

So read on...

You might like to try these alternatives instead

1. Check your website "hits" 10 times a day

2. Sorry, what does a "hit" mean anyway?

3. Read the latest reviews of Wall-E

4. Check your position on Google. Sorry, this list is supposed to be about not checking...

5. Clear out your TiVo recordings. Wait, I'll just check out that Friends episode again.

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Head on over to Starbucks

Did you spot the odd one out?

Of course you really need to know whether you are going in the right direction before you release your attachment to the PageRank goal. What should you do?

It comes down to two main things:

1. Collect plenty of good quality links to your pages.

2. Build lots of relevant, interesting content

You've probably heard these before but they are true. Apply your focus to these two principles and you'll be heading in the right direction!

So how do you get started building some great content for your website? Sign up below for my guide Squeeze More Results From Your Website to find out!

It's useful to look at how the PageRank process works

Why? Because if you understand the various steps involved then you will also understand why the process can take a while. (Oh, and it's also gives you some shorter term goals to aim for, which is good too)

1. Google indexes your pages

It can take a while for Google to find and index the pages of your site. Often this can be fairly quick, and it helps here if you have other sites linking to yours.

Another way to look at it is this - if you don't have any external links to your site it can take a long time for Google to find you (possibly never). Of course you can help this by submitting your site, maybe with a sitemap. This doesn't seem to be as useful as it used to be, so long as you have links to your site

2. Google spiders the links to your site

Once you have your external links in place Google will spider through all of these and work out which pages link to your site. This can take a while too.

One problem here is that Google doesn't report many of the links that it finds. It might list some of the high value ones, but it's hard to know exactly why it chooses to show some, but not others. This makes it hard to track how your links are building.

3. Google increases its internal "score"

Once your links get to a certain threshold Google will start to rank your site higher in the search results. You'll start to see a little more traffic to your site from organic Google search.

Again, it can take a while to get to this stage. This doesn't always coincide with an increase in your PageRank though. It often takes longer still to get to this stage.

4. Google changes your PageRank

Hopefully it went up!