I have a web site www.monkhousehill.co.uk for my holiday accommodation
business, and am working hard to boost its PageRank on Google. One
thing I have done is to purchase links from about 20 other tourism and
accommodation sites. However, when I use Google link tool it tells me
that it cannot find any links to my site. Some sites of businesses
similar to my own, also with links from these same tourism sites, do
have these links found by the link tool. And they seem to have a
better PageRank. Please advise if there is something I need to do to
my site to ensure that Google sees the links to it. Any other comments
on the PageRank friendliness of my site would also be welcomed.

Hi, 

There is a delay between getting a link and when Google sets the link
as a true link to your site in the database. For instance, I set up a
link on a page yesterday to a client site. It probably won't show up
until next month. Also there is a correlation to what the page rank of
the site that is giving you the link is, and how much that will affect
your website. For instance, my site at level 4 will not give a site
with a level of 6 as much benefit as a site with a level of 2. Its
still a link and is noted, but the effectiveness is not as grand. So
when looking to "purchase" links from sites, check out the PR of the
page they are going to link you from, not just the main page.

If the PR of the page they are using to place your link on is 0 or
"grayed" the link may not show up at all. Keep this in mind as well.
Each page on a website has its own PR.

There are a few things you can do to boost your own page rank, at
least to 4.

Add a robots.txt to your site.
You can find out about Robot files here:
http://www.upenn.edu/computing/web/webdev/meta/metarobot.html

And you can find one that will work for your site here:
http://www.lucidmatrix.com/uploads/robots.txt

This will help the robots to index your site. 

Second, change your links to full links. 
Using this page here :
Search Engine Spider Simulator
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
Check what the robots are seeing when they get to your site. You will
see a list of links on your page near the bottom of the output, after
doing the evaluation. You will see that your internal links look like
this
http://couples.htm/
http://families.htm/
http://largerfam.htm/

Change these links so that they are full URL's. 
http://www.monkhousehill.co.uk/couples.htm/
http://www.monkhousehill.co.uk/families.htm/
http://www.monkhousehill.co.uk/largerfam.htm/

With the images on your menu, put in Alt tags with the same text that
is in the image.

Reduce the actual byte size of the page. To do this you are probably
going to need to find a Internet Programmer. You, or your designer has
used Front Page to create the design, and there is nothing wrong with
that, especially if you want to play around with different designs and
concepts. Good Clay, is what I call Front page, and other programs
like it. But, Front page adds a lot of code to a site which it doesn't
need. Take this quick example for instance.

<font face="Arial" size="2">[top of this page]</font></a><font
face="Arial" size="2">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="index.html">[home
page]</a></font></font></p>

You see the nested "<font face="Arial" size="2">" ? It's redundant.
Its not doing anything there at all. Most likely its a place where you
put some text, and decided you didn't like it and removed it, or added
the link after the original creation, or, Front page just decided to
put it in there.It's not affecting your page or the way it looks,  But
what it is doing is altering your page size vrs. content ratio, and
that is not good for Page Rank. So getting someone who is experienced
in this to clean up the site and get all the un-needed code out of
there, would be a good thing. Also your pages will load much faster,
maybe even twice as fast as they do now, once this is done, and that
will make your visitors happy.

Here are some pages on the Google Search Engine:

Google Under the Scope
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm

PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web
http://hci.stanford.edu/~page/papers/pagerank/

Thanks, 

webadept-ga