Is there any ways to rank higher than a site, similar to your own without having a higher PR?

There most certainly is. PR is only a small factor that plays a part in the ranking of a web page. This recent post has some useful links which might help you.

If the end user searches for something that your page seems more relevant to than the other, similar site. The text being searched showing up in your page title and URL means a lot more than PageRank.

Yeah, get a good number of backlinks with the right anchor texts. Optimize your page for the keywords in organic ways.

Pagerank is a value that represents how important a page is on the web. To improve google rankings is to get more backlinks for the site. Choose trusted and quality links.Optimize your page with keyword density and promixity, and then promotion and link building for the site

Originally Posted by andmcgr

Is there any ways to rank higher than a site, similar to your own without having a higher PR?

andmcgr: first off, any time you ask a Google question, some idiotic lemming is bound and determined to come up with the theory that PageRank = search rank, even when someone does the intelligent thing (as you did) and ask what to do other than to worry about PageRank.

Basically, SEO is becoming more and more about the the user experience and those sites which cater to their users and don't try to wipe the *** of the search engines after they go number 2. Make sure your site is clean, easily navigable, doesn't contain excessive code, and most importantly make sure it has content that users can...well, use.

It's the content that will quite often trigger the types of backlinks that PageRank-obsessed lunatics covet: organic, quality backlinks that send non-search-engine traffic (I've heard some SEO experts refer to this traffic as "people") to sites that deserve it.

In other words, build your site slowly, update it frequently, keep your users in mind, and you'll be fine. It might not even take that long to get first page ranking and traffic from a search engine for phrases and words that you never even targeted. I've seen it happen in as little as 7-10 days.

If it's the forum site in your signature, most forums are "self-SEOing", in that they gain ranking for phrases as people participate. It makes forum growth exponential to a small extent (and really frustrating for the owners), but that's how it is.

Hope that helped you.

CONTENT is the king in SEO of any site. Mainly for google, the content should be unique. Then try for good relevant backlinks.

Originally Posted by andmcgr

Is there any ways to rank higher than a site, similar to your own without having a higher PR?

Perhaps the best thing to do is, pretend search engines do not exist for a moment.

If there were no search engines, how would you promote your site?

Paul, I dare you to propose that idea to a blackhat.

Adam raised some good, basic points. Page Rank is a symptom of Search Engine ranking, and not vice versa. Personally, I find the whole idea of Page Rank highly suspect. I mean, who the hell is Google to rate the "importance" of any given page? I guarantee that they guys who play 5 Clicks to Jesus on Wikipedia might not consider the BBC Football page important, but the guy who's stuck in the office during a Champion's League match (ie me) sure as hell does.

I tend to ignore Page Rank completely. I've seen Google search results display sites with relatively low Page Rank (2-4) higher than those with large Page Rank (5-8).

Good SEO principles are the key for search engine recognition - original, authoratative content that users need, lots of back links, media, frequent updates and uncomplicated code. Nowadays with the bevy of expert SEOers out there, most pages are easily navigated and have proper architecture. What's really going to separate you is not so much the design of the site, but what you put on it.

Originally Posted by andmcgr

Is there any ways to rank higher than a site, similar to your own without having a higher PR?

You can get higher ranking even without PR as long as you optimized your site well. Just get more quality links and create your content using your targeted keywords.

Improve your site's link popularity and use your targeted keywords as your anchor text....and improve your contents with your targeted keywords...

as everyone pointed out most imp is links.. the quality and relevant links pointing to your site with keywords in the anchor text

good content and good amount of relevant back links

and i must say, your site must also be user friendly in a sense that visitors will not have a hard time navigating your site or seeing the information that they want

Adding keywords to your site is one of the best ways to improve ranking at your site at Google.Important high quality site have a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search
So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important, and relevant to your search."

Get more backlinks for the site and update content

Originally Posted by andmcgr

Is there any ways to rank higher than a site, similar to your own without having a higher PR?

From my limited experience with Google here are some of my observations...

Links are important but not the be-all to end-all.

You have some sites ranking higher than other sites with more incoming links.

UNIQUE content is king!

There used to be a time all you needed was loads of text and lots of pages to rank. No longer!

BE FIRST!

It seems like once you rank highly for a term, you always rank highly for that term as long as you have decent links and UNIQUE content.

I'd point out the unique content, then also try to analyze your competitor's on the keyword density using any seotools like ranks.nl, and make changes in you pages.

Originally Posted by andmcgr

Is there any ways to rank higher than a site, similar to your own without having a higher PR?

So far I have found custom content to have the best results if you get enough of it. If another site trys to copy your content, the duplicate content filters should kick in and rate the other sites worse. But i could be wrong, any confirmation?

linkbacks are your best friend i'm afraid

ofcourse backlinks are important. But use of proper html tag is important also. I mean try to use right keywords with "<h1>", "<li>" tags.

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