Increasing PR on Google and the Importance...

What are some great ways to increase the PR of my website? I have read about blogging and search engines and such,but is there anything more that can be done.

I know there is no quick fix, but how long can it take to go up for example from a 3 to a 5?

All comments are appreciated!

Well, first of all you should ask if you need pagerank, and for what reason :)

Pagerank is generated by incoming links. The amount of incoming links your site has in addition to the pagerank of the pages that link to it increases the pagerank. But having high pagerank does not mean that you will get more traffic from search engines, or that you will get traffic from the desired keywords.

For example google will give you more traffic for a keyword if you get less links from pages with lower pagerank if those pages are relevant to your site, instead of having many inbound links from high pagerank non relevant sites.

Now regarding the "how quick" question, I think a few pagerank 5 links from different sites (hosted in different ips) can give you a 3-5 in a few months (about 6 months I guess). But those predictions can't be accurate especially after the last pagerank update where google showed us that something has been changed.

buy 10 PR6 links from related website and you have a PR5 after max. 2 Google updates

@Olaf thats not quite true is it ;)
Page ranking is simply a figure given out by Google as to how well or popular your site is, its an arbituary figure and actually has no relevance outside of PR by that I mean a PR 6 site will list no higher then a PR 5 site on a SERP page for given keywords, PR is seperate from SERP position and has perhaps some but little bearing. Google itself reccomends that you use it simply as a judge, indeed if you use Google sitemaps you will notice the PR scores it gives are different, this is simply that this score is more up to date then the ones shown via Google toolbar etc.

How to increase PR..
Links are good, though not always so for example if you have links to directories only, even high PR directories your ranking is not as good as coming from an equivilent organic PR site. The reason is because PR is all about relevancy to link ratio, how relevant is the link or content to the outgoing and incoming links.  Hence my comment to Olaf, he is right a great start is to buy, or submit to PR 6 directories but this alone will not bring instant PR success, links from directories and organic sites with similar keywords is your best route forward, but and its a big but ask your self Why!

PR does not bring more visitors on its own
PR is not the holy grail of marketing
PR in itself provides you with nothing more then a warm feeling

However if you have a good link building and marketing strategy then tht will bring visitors, visitors mean on the whole revenue which is important, they also mean organic links, people linking back to your site. Doubled with Good content and link baiting your PR will rise as a by product, so you gain more visitors, have achieved the holy grail in marketing and have the warm feeling.

Yes and I'm happy with that :D

my "expansive" example is only purposed to raise the PR not the ranking in the SERP's...

Personally the only thing that found PR good is the price of the links. Even that PR means nothing link prices are always higher from a higher PR site :)

Another one is the indexing. I think that sites with decent PR get indexed/crawled faster. Of course if your site is not updated frequently the PR wont change anything :)

But it won't on its own do either, high PR directories do not result in higher PR unless acommpanied with organic links from high PR sites. I'm not suggesting not buying the links, but that it should be part of a larger strategy and buying links in directories alone will only make a small difference.

I didn't talked about directories but about links from related websites...

@Nick,
I think the pagerank is founded for SEO's and webmasters lol

Lol, that's actually correct. It is more like a buzz in our days....

Thanks for the input.  I think there is a common misconception almost everywhere regarding PR.  Hopefully this post will help someone, like myself, sleep a little better at night!  Thanks!

your quite right some how I saw the words directories...
Any way I want to add my voice to the its just something SEO's throw around and even then they tend to use it as a way of explaining bad results.

lol...

Actually what we say here is not 100% correct. That buzz created because when Google started back in 98, pagerank was the technology that made them #1 search engine and it was their main ranking factor. As the years passed and SEOs - SE spammers realized how that works google changed their algorithm in various ways.

After almost 10 years they still using incoming links to rank a site, but now this is much more complicated as google can understand how relative is a page that links to you with your page, and now uses much more factors to rank a site, so pagerank by itself is totally useless.

This thread got some very interesting comments.

Even though we know that PR by itself is quite outdated and can be manipulated, it is still a pricing criteria for all (or almost all) webmaster related deals.