Every time you link to a website from yours, a little bit of your Link Juice goes to that site. Likewise, a site that links to you will give a bit of its Link Juice to you. The higher the PR of the site you link to, the more of your Link Juice you can expect to go to them. And vice versa: the higher PR your site has, the more Link Juice a site gives when it links to you.

For this reason it’s essential to maintain a decent balance of inbound and outbound links.

Here’a a decent article that further explains Link Juice: The Keyword Academy: Link Juice Explained.

This is a question that many search engine optimizers as well as everyday bloggers ask themselves and each other. While there is no definitive, foolproof, here’s-exactly-what-you-need-to-do way of increasing your Google PageRank, or at the very least maintain it, there are things you can do to help significantly improve your chances of keeping or improving your GooglePR with subsequent updates. Here’s a random, in-no-particular-order list:

• Blog frequently. Google favors blogs whose content is updated regularly. Keep things fresh!
• Be unique. Under no circumstances should you post duplicate content. This is bad, bad, bad.
• Get quality inbound links. For example, two inbound links from PR5 sites have a lot more weight than five links from PR2 sites.
• Give quality and even not-so-quality outbound links. But try to maintain a balance between your inbound and outbound links.
• Keep your site’s layout up to date and as compliant with HTML and XHTML as possible.
• Keywords, keywords, keywords. Use ‘em everywhere!
• Hook up your site with article submission sites, web directories, and social networks.

Make sure you refer to this list and use it on a regular basis to help maintain quality for your website.

Believe it or not, Google PageRank is something that is updated continuously. Each day, all around the clock, Google’s servers and magical powers are combing the web and individual blogs, doing various calculations and checks to see what a website’s ranking should be. It’s only every couple of months that the “results” of those calculations and checks are officially released, in the form of a Google PageRank update.

Want to check your blog’s Google PageRank? Use CheckPageRank.net or PRChecker.info.

Psst… you can check any website’s Google PageRank here!

I went ahead and took the quiz, and here’s what I discovered: I suck. Unfortunately, I am one of those people who knows the basics, and little tidbits here and there, but clearly not enough to be classified an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination!

There is definitely a lot of controversy surround paid commenting — in fact, I think paid comments are more controversial than paid blog entries! It’s such a hot topic because it’s one thing to utilize your own blog to make some money. But to use other people’s blogs? Like I said… a definite hot-button issue.

I will be the first to admit that I have done some paid commenting here and there. Besides getting paid, the only thing different about these types of comments is the info presented in the name, email address, and URL fields. Other than that, everything is the same. I thoroughly read the blogger’s blog entry, and I formulated a response that showed my sincere interest in what they had to say. I’ve left compliments, offered advice, commiserated with someone on a shitty day, etc., via paid comments.

Some will argue that paid comments are a way of “using” a blog for its SEO potential. But when people normally leave comments they include their own URLs, in the hopes of getting hits back to their own sites. So in that regard, how is it any different?

From Wikipedia:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.

SEO is all about taking a keyword or set of keywords, and putting it/them out there with links so that search engines eventually tie that keyword/those keywords into you. Let’s say I was interested in getting iblogalicious.com to rank high in search engines. I would need to pick keywords to represent my site, and associate iblogalicious.com URLs with them, and then get them linked on many other sites via organic, non-paid means. And with any luck, eventually iblogalicious.com might rank highly for any searches done using those keywords!