Search engine optimization is often a system of trial and error. Even when a particular strategy is discovered and does work well, it is quickly overused and abused by too many people, which in turn means that the search engines will change their criteria again and the whole process starts over.

Google often does not show that you are getting credit for many of the backlinks that you have to your site. Google does not want to tell you everything that it knows – this is to help keep some of the mystery in search engine optimization. By keeping its criteria shrouded in mystery, Google helps to ensure that people do not misuse the system and try to falsely inflate their backlinks in order to increase their search engine optimization for their site.

That does not mean that the entire system is unknown. There are certain strategies that are known to be effective.

Here are five tips to help you get strong Google backlinks.

Sign up for Google Webmaster Central. You need to know what Google thinks about your site and that Google likes your site. This is critical for your website and your pages to rank highly.

After you’ve set up Webmaster Central, you can start looking for new links. You need to make sure that they are relevant to your site.

Directories can give you excellent links, and they can also give you great traffic. Even if you have a directory that is a no follow, you can still get some incredible benefits by being listed in good directories. Keep in mind that you will probably have to pay a fee in order to get a listing in a good directory.

Get social. You may not think that you have time to waste on forums and message boards that are relevant to your site, but it is not a waste of time – it can be a huge boost to your site if you join a forum that is related to your topic and you become an active participant in that online community.

Keep at it and be consistent. It is better to work a few hours a week on the back links to your site than to work on it for two days straight and then not bother to do anything with it for six months. Consistently building is considered to be more natural link building.

PageRank is a system of algorithms that assigns a value to the different pages on the Internet in order to determine the importance or the relevance of those pages. This system was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the founders of Google) and it is unique to Google; however, other search engines will use a different ranking system in order to determine the order of their search engine results.

Many website owners wonder how many backlinks they need in order to achieve a particular PageRank. There is no definite answer to this question because PageRank depends on a large number of factors – not just backlinks.

However, there are a few things that can be determined to usually improve your PageRank.

First, you need to increase the number of back links to your site each month. The reasoning behind this is that if you are providing valuable content, other sites will naturally link to you because it provides a good service to their readers. If you are providing good content on a regular basis, your natural backlinks will increase each month.

Second, you need to make sure that the sites that you are linking to are quality sites. Although you cannot control who links to you, you can certainly control the sites that you link to. If you have a site linking to you that is considered a spam site or a link farm, this can have a negative effect on your PR; however, if you are found linking to one of these spam sites or link farms, it can have a drastically negative effect on your PR – possibly even getting your site de-indexed.

Third, if you can have a website with a higher PR link to you, then it can raise your PR. If you have sites with a lower PR link to you, then you can have a negative effect on your PR.

While keeping in mind that PR and how you get a higher PR is still somewhat shrouded in mystery, if you keep these three tips in mind you will be on your way to increasing your PageRank.