First and foremost, make sure you have a good website host that is dependable. powweb !!!
I have no idea how companies do it. I have been working like a dog to gain rank for some of the sites I work on. I do all of the optimization I do all of the meta tagging. I find that social sites are a poor source. I mean 3-5 years ago, it was the best snowball. Now, not as much as they still claim it is worth. advertising on sites seems to do nothing for me. I mean it is good while you pay for the advertisements. As soon as you stop paying, your rank plummets. The whole time you pay, it seems no one clicks the links.
SEO Tools
I work hard on alexa ranking, Compete ranking and MozRank. Alexa moves really fast when you try hard, but compete and Moz not near as fast.
Web ring. So far the best assurance to gain rank at either site, is to be in the good old fashion web ring. A web ring is a bunch of sites with similar interest who link back to each other. That of course is very hard to achieve. Most of the people who are in the same field as the site I am working don’t want to give up some potential customers by having them click my links and see better stuff for cheaper cost. Or what ever. There are a bunch of sites that have “submit link” button on their site with a code that you put on your site so people can find them better, much like a web ring. Downside to that is, if your competitor crawls your website to see what gets you so many people, they will see that stupid link and use them also. Now you are right back where you were before you resorted to that method.
Originality. Many of the sites I work on, I can copy almost every sentence the owner wrote up and find it in Google. Word for word. Google will not accept that. Why would they link to a re-run ? So now I have to explain the importance of originality to the site owner without talking to complex and without sounding like I think they are a moron, yet still keep their attention so they allow me to fix it.
Updating and creating new content. I do it all the time, but you can only have so many pages before your website is to much. You can’t have customers trying to look through a website of greater than 10000 pages. It’s just insane. Unless you have a detailed search feature. Getting page rank is a bit more costly that it needs to be with this method.
Generating traffic. Well you can’t force people to go. you have to have people say “no it’s cool and all of the cool people do it” otherwise everyone everyone refuses to follow advertisements. Yes we are that simple of a species. Good idea to try is find a social site of some sort and make like 50 fake accounts and mention your site. but not spammy, just find topics that relate and chime in. Of course one person calls you spam and your i.p. addy is banned and your site is submitted to your dns and Google dns as spam. BLACKLISTED.
I do what I have to do. Sometimes I have to do everything. Just not so much it jeopardizes my domains. Gaining pr is no easy task, page rank shouldn’t be easy. Otherwise Google would be full by now. Alexa, mozrank, compete, search engines like, Google, bing and yahoo would practically be useless. you would just type stuff and see where it lands you. So getting page rank is a validation of your site’s worthiness. Only thing is to get page rank you have to get someone’s attention to prove you are everything you need to be. So how do you get the needed attention to gain page rank? well…. just keep at it. It will happen.