Anyone carrying out Dental SEO needs to understand pagerank and not just the basics but a few key bits of information that if misunderstood could render your efforts useless or even do more harm than good when you set about link building to improve pagerank.
If you use a professional for your dental SEO they should of course understand what they are doing and will often show results through improvements in pagerank, this is important but only if rankings for good keywords come with it, often lower pagerank pages will do better than higher pagerank pages in Google results for competitive keywords because the pages are well optimized so make sure you have both done for your dental SEO.
Pagerank is a simple scale from 0 – 10 though new pages will have a n/a until Google do their first pagerank update once they find the page, these updates happen approximately every six months. You can track pagerank though through tools including Google’s own toolbar, a higher pagerank is better and higher numbers are rarer with a very low percentage of pages ever achieving a pagerank of over 5.
Pagerank is based on the links you have to a page including internal links and external links, in both cases pagerank value gets passed depending on the pagerank of the linking page and what is common is to get all links to one page such as the homepage of a site that can then pass pagerank to other pages. If the structure of a site is well designed most pages must end up with the same pagerank only 1 less than the targeted page, navigation is a vital part of dental SEO therefore.
When getting links from external websites there are a few things you need to remember to make sure the links are valuable for you, one is that they are from high pagerank pages or pages that are likely to grow pagerank in the future such as forum topics and new blog posts. Forum topics and blogposts are great places to comment as you can add unique comments relevant to the topic and your link each time, which Google generally see as good quality valuable links, while copied content and links on irrelevant pages or pages with little unique content are likely to be ignored. With some websites you could even get penalized for a link, not always immediately but potentially later when Google identify a page as being full of spam links.
Always ensure relevancy then and get links from high quality and not just high pagerank pages you may even want to consider writing guest posts on other sites and for dental SEO local focused websites and chamber of commerce websites may be ideal.
The other vital thing is to make sure the links you get are do follow, a no follow link gives you no value as it a way of the site saying please ignore this link to Google. Building links that pass no value is a waste of your time, a quick way to check is to use tools that highlight no follow links and if a site has only these type of external links you should move on.