As the owner of a small business, I was rather pleased to learn our Website achieved a 7/10 Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) PageRank this month. Typically only major companies accomplish this -- Fortune 500 companies, major media companies, and big name bloggers. How did we do it? Pretty simple: The answer is holistic search engine optimization (SEO).

First of all, Google PageRank is the process of assigning numeric weighting from 0-10 for each Webpage on the Internet. This PageRank denotes a site's importance in the eyes of Google. The scale for PageRank is logarithmic and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links, as well as importance of the page providing the link.

We have remained patient with our site's performance. Even though the domain has been registered for five years, we successfully avoided the temptation to actively build links to the site. Instead of merely building links, we methodically wrote articles and blog postings that filled the site with relevant information. We also made on-site updates through the years, like adding a permanent redirect, adding no-follows to the outgoing links, and improving title tags -- but nothing that you need to be a rocket scientist to understand.

Unfortunately for SEO gurus and clients, a higher PageRank does not happen instantly. If you are trying to achieve this you might find it difficult to be patient, and if it is for your client, it will be even more difficult to try and convince your clients to be patient for these kinds of results.

The status symbol of having a high PageRank is the true benefit. Achieving it shows the world and all of your audiences that you have optimized your site and accomplished creating a genuinely relevant site.

There are, however, other ways to speed up the process, which includes buying links to your site from sites that have a high PageRank. Being able to buy highly ranked links to your site is Google's Achilles' heel. Google hates this manipulation of PageRank, because it's basically an artificial vote of popularity.

The natural and more accepted way of creating back-links is via blogs and forums. For instance, posting comments on a highly trafficked blog immediately creates a link to your site. The downside is that blogs are being increasingly used for this kind of link building so there is a possibility they will be treated like spam by the blog administrators. They can delete unrelated and spurious comments that contribute no value, so if you take the route of blog posting, make sure to post relevant and interesting comments.

Here is an example:

Assume that you wish to optimize the term 'page rank success.' The first step is to create quality content that relates to that term. It might be something as simple as a blog posting, white paper, article, or how-to guide. Step two is to ensure that the URL reflects the term. This should look like this: yoursitename.com/page-rank-success.html. Note that hyphenating each word gives you a better chance of being indexed correctly.

If your content is up to speed, you should work on having other sites link to that term. Always link to the term in addition to your company name because that is what your customers are most likely to use when searching the Internet. Making the title of a blog catchy is more important on static pages because it is more effective when including terms you want people to associate with you when searching for you. These are easy but good first steps toward getting that high PageRank that every small business hopes for.

— Richard Banfield, CEO of Fresh Tilled Soil