It’s Important But Not The End

PageRank is probably one of the first signs your site has landed. Established a user base, good content, and most importantly is legitimate. Unfortunately Google has done a bit of flip flopping. Page rank info has been removed from the web master tools. So why?

Well pagerank is not as important as first thought. While it’s important, it should not be the central focus when building a new site. So content > design > PR? Just another part of the battle between SEO experts and search engines as they attempt to capture more of the advertising revenue. While it still holds an important status page rank is no different.

So the bottom line is: build a good site and page rank, search ranking, and money will naturally follow. Don’t let the SEO game slow you down and remember PageRank is just a number.

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A few questions to ask yourself …

If you’re ranking in the top 10 then you can ignore this list. However if you’re competitors are ranking ahead of you, perhaps the answer to your ranking issues lies in these questions.

Is your website cluttered with pictures or text? Is there a balance?
What keywords have you targeted vs the keywords your competitors have targeted?
Does your domain match your market?
How many inlinks do you have?
What Meta tags are you using?
Is your body text longer than 600 words?
What’s your page rank?
Is your site easy to navigate?

Answering some of these questions will help you better understand your competition. Analyzing your competitors and their sites will help you integrate some of those ideas into the theme of your site. Simply copying the competition is not the answer. Putting a different spin on a subject, offering great content, and building links will get you to the top.

Common elements of good websites

If your website is missing one of these items this could explain why its not living up to it’s potential.

1. Navigation bars – header/footer. It’s a good idea to have them both just for simplicity. Try to give every incentive for the user to visit another one of your pages and potential use your services.

2. About page – with useful information. Sure you have an about page, but is there anything unique in there which personalizes you or your services? Anyone visiting your about page wants to check up on you and get a better feel for your company. If you provide good info and background that could be enough to seal the deal.

3. Updates. Having the option to subscribe to a newsletter or blog feed keeps your visitors in the loop. This takes the guess work out of the equation and gets new content to your visitors as you produce it.

4. Browser compatibility. Not every visitor is using IE7 (or Firefox, or even Safari). From a visitor’s point of view a web site that does not display properly in the browser “I’m” using never leaves a good impression. It takes a bit more of an effort but I’m the the user visiting from their iPhone will appreciate it.

5. Search. Maybe you haven’t created a page for every topic but you certainly have covered it on a few other pages. Sometimes a search feature will provide the answer for the user who doesn’t fit into the standard category.

Tips from Google

Google’s blog covered a few topics when dealing with SEO with regards to linking, content, site architecture. Many of the same old tips have been reinforced. Despite the same old answers coming up it is somewhat comforting to hear it from a Google engineer.

Site content is very important as well as authoritative sites linking to that content. It is unavoidable that spam sites will always link to good content however the driving factor will be the number and quality sites linking to yours. These inbound links will also affect your page rank. Although search engine results should weigh importantly over page rank (don’t worry if you’re only a PR 2).

Blogs: original and innovative stuff will be a bigger hit with your audience as well as with the search engines. Providing useful information within the community and having a great product also helps. Engaging the community is what blogs are all about.

Despite Google’s battle with link buying what they say and what actually happens are 2 different things. It’s no secret Google is waging a battle vs paid linking advertising however those with bigger wallets have still been winning the battle. Most common keyword search terms are littered with link buyers. Hopefully Google has something special up their sleeves to counter massive link buying campaigns.

Tips for internal links

Setting up your internal links will help your external links. It’s going to point new visitors to where you want them to go and help them navigate your site. Make sure you pick the right keywords and titles. Meta descriptions also go a long way. Writing good content will develop page rank which will start bringing traffic to your site. Make sure you don’t duplicate content, this might confuse the googlebot and discount any pages you create. Stay consistent when linking internally. Use nofollow for pages with duplicate content and partner sites that you do not want to pass page rank to.

Take a look at competitor sites, pick out the things you like and incorporate them into your style. Keep your navigation bar clean and limit the number of links. Less choices = simpler navigation.

Live PageRank for Firefox 3.0

If you’re reading this blog you know having a page rank tool built in to your browser (or having an add on or toolbar) is extremely useful. As well if you one of the many people who jumped on the Firefox 3.0 download bandwagon you probably noticed Live PageRank no longer works. Well someone’s gone ahead and finally released a compatible Firefox 3.0 add on and not from the original creator. Download it if you need it.

Live PageRank add on for Firefox 3.0

PageRank reshuffle?

Anyone else notice a shuffle in pagerank? I noticed a few of my blogs recently increased in pagerank. However, on the downside, some of them also went down. I thought the last Google PR run was back in February. That’s when I noticed a bunch of of my new sites getting ranked. I thought the general consensus was the this was done only twice a year, every 6 months. Traffic was mainly the factor that I noticed. The blogs getting more traffic benefited from a higher pagerank valuation. The few sites getting a downturn in traffic dropped. I guess I’ll keep an eye on it while I’m trying to get more visitors to my struggling sites.