Pagerank Explained
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your que
SEO tips can help you to get higher Yahoo or Google listings, but only if you use them. Most people think that they know better, even so called SEO professionals who have to use PPC advertising to get their websites listed highly enough to be seen. Who are they to tell us what to do, when they cannot it themselves?
I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3′. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN. I will gladly accept their criticism of my HTML and linking when they achieve the same. Till then, perhaps they would be better buying my book that complaining about my websites!
I would feel more predisposed to them if they stopped criticizing me - I only started to do the same to them when I got sick of their comments when they could not emulate my results. Who am I, a rank amateur, to beat them in the SEO stakes!! In fact, I have been at this for many years.
So, SEO tip #1 - don’t believe anything you are told unless those telling you it have at least one of their websites in the top 5 on all the major search engines for a competitive keyword. Mine has >800 million other results on Google.
Tip 2 - use classical search engine optimization. Use Meta tags because some search engines still use them. The main one is the Description Meta tag - Keywords is not so important but use it anyway. It does not hurt you, so use them.
The third tip relates to the title of your website. There are two points that relate to this. The first is that it should be the best keyword that you can find that relates to your niche or website. That means a good demand and low supply, though too much is sometimes written about this since such keywords are not easy to find. If you can’t something with low supply, just use what you want and decide to compete against them. Somebody has to be top, and why can’t it be you? Too many people give up in SEO too quickly. Probably because we are told not to compete against the big boys - by these big boys!!
The second point is that the title of your site need not be stated on every web page. My web page titles are those of the page, not the site. The graphics are the same, but the title is the keyword that they page is optimized for. Why do otherwise? Yet 99.99% do (just a guess!). Then fourth of my SEO tips is related to the headings on each page. The main title of the page should be in H1 tags, and the heading in H2 tags. You don’t need any more, but any subheadings can go into H3 tags, but should contain text that could be construed as minor keywords.
I might be wrong, but who says? I have found that if you ignore the big guys, and compete against them, they can be beat. Check out what they are trying to sell you and you will notice that much of it is obsolete. Such as site generation and article generation software. That’s not an SEO tip, just a word to the wise, from the not so wise. I have no pretensions, but I know where my home page is on Google - and Yahoo - and MSN. Just search for ‘article services’.
The fifth SEO tip is to use your keywords sparingly. Most people still think that 1% - 3% keyword density is ideal, yet it is actually too much. There is an optimum keyword density that has little to do with the keyword itself, but more to do with contextual relevance of the page content to the topic in hand. Which leads to the sixth of the SEO tips: write naturally and honestly. If you know about your subject, write about it in your own language and don’t try to meet any perceived need for a specific number of so-called keywords within your page content.
Seventh, don’t forget about your links. You can get a higher search engine listing if you have lots of links back to your website from other sites. In fact, the links are from page to page, and you get a proportion of the Google PageRank of the page linking to you, relative to the number of other links leaving that page, and also give the page that you link to a proportion of your PageRank, calculated in the same way. The problem with reciprocal links is that most pages are linked to and from pages with a PageRank of zero, even though the website home page can have a PR of 6 or 7.
SEO tip eight. Use your internal linking to maximise the PageRank of a selected page on your website. You don’t need every page on your site listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo: you only need one. So maximise your efforts on that one page. Visitors that page will then visit the rest of the pages on your website, and so will search engine spiders, so you know that every page on your site will be listed and with a chance of being found in a search.
The important point of that tip is to concentrate on getting one page in the top 10. That’s all you need. You will have links to all your other pages once somebody reaches that page in the top 10. Tip nine: Once you get visitors keep them there. Give them useful content and something to do, even if just to click from page to page. Offer them a free gift for completing a quiz on your topic, or free vacation certificates for certain actions: these are easily found on the internet in a form that you can either post or email for them to print their own. Offer them an opt-in form so that you can keep in touch.
That is the most important tip of all - if you can keep in touch with your visitors after they have left your site, then you can offer them new products as they come along without having to seduce them to visit your website again.
The concept is simple; page rank allows the most important websites to appear at the top of search results. Although you may have seen complicated theories of how page rank works, illustrated by stupendously complicated mathematical formulas, you do not need to be a genius to understand the basic principles. By understanding the basic principles you will then be able to begin working towards achieving a higher page rank for your website, I have achieved a PR 5 for my website and I am no mathematical genius! Basically, Google page rank spans from 0-10. It would be typical for a webpage which has just being indexed by Google to achieve a page rank 0. A webmaster should always be aiming to achieve a higher page rank; this should be an ongoing process. So, how do you go about achieving a higher page rank? Well, a page rank is determined by a web page’s importance, the importance is calculated simply by the number of other web pages which contain a RELEVANT link to the webpage. The logic goes as forth, if many relevant websites contain a link to a web page then the web page must be important. The keyword to remember is RELEVANCY. Google attaches a huge amount of importance to relevancy. There are millions of people who try and achieve a higher Google page rank simply by submitting their website to many, many web directories, this however is really not an effective way of obtaining a high page rank, in many cases the only thing that this will achieve is a reduction in time taken for Google to index your web pages. It may therefore interest you to know that hundreds of links from web directories which link to thousands of other web pages is highly likely to be less beneficial than just one link from another content related website with a high page rank. If you are wanting to obtain a higher page rank in the least possible amount of time your best option is to run a Google search using the keywords for your website. Take note of the top page of results, then, visit the high ranking web pages one by one. Write to the webmasters and ask if you can participate in a link exchange, the answer is likely to be no, however the response to a paid link exchange may be different, and well worth your while. Don’t be afraid of wasting time in this process because even though you may get turned down by many if you are successful with just one highly ranking relevant site, the benefits will be huge and well worth your while in terms of traffic generated. It is also important to realise that Google pays a lot of attention to the title of the link, make sure you include many key words in your link. Personally I have tried in the past just about every method under the sun, (on the web!) in order to try and generate higher page rank. I have attempted buying links from high page rank sites on ebay. However the sites that I chose, despite being PR 6 were not relevant to my website and after 6 months they resulted in no increase to my page ranking. At this point I learnt my lesson about relevancy, in simple terms it goes something like this, ‘If you have a website based on gardening, then there is no point, whatsoever on exchanging links with someone who has a website based on train spotting’. It will get you no where.
If you reap no rewards from talking to webmasters about link exchanges then all is not lost. One of the best methods I use for my website is to write good quality, (I hope) articles, somewhere within the articles I drop reference to my website, in the form of a link, Ad sense Hero! Contains other advice for webmasters Just ‘link’ that. Ha- sorry about the pun. So there you go, write articles and submit them to good quality sites like ezine. Given that your article is good enough to be accepted you will achieve, a relevant link, on a page with relevant content.
There are in fact other factors which affect page rank notably the amount of outbound links from a website. If a highly ranking website has only a handful of links to other pages and one of the links is to your website then the results will be much more beneficial to you than a website that has thousands of outbound links. In effect it seems that Google divides the benefit of the site with page rank between all of the other sites which it links to. This explains why web directories are not beneficial, not only are they irrelevant, they also contain thousands of outbound links. Meaning the page rank benefit is divided between, yeah, you guessed,,, thousands! Time well spent? Nope!
It seems that having new, fresh and original content on your website also increases the frequency at which Google crawls your site, thus making note of new changes. So keep writing and don’t give up. It seems that if you have a site with good regularly updated content, with no tricks necessary, it will at sometime receive traffic; it may just not be as quick as you want and this is why you will probably find yourself following my earlier advice.
Things do get easier, after you have traffic visiting your quality website you will find that your page rank begins to go up on its own. This is because people begin to make links to your website from their freewill in order to make quotes or simply recommend your website to their own visitors. Once the ball is rolling it does get easier. You see?
I hope you enjoyed and benefited from my efforts today! Remember, be patient, things with Google are often slow; rumour has it a Page rank update only occurs every three months,-seems about true in my opinion, and for low page ranking pages apparently a Google bot only crawls, around every three weeks. I don’t have total confidence in the information in this last paragraph; in fact, I don’t think anyone knows for sure. However I do know for sure that my PR 5 website is crawled almost daily by Google’s bot. So just keep on going and be patient! I now make a good income from my site through adsense however it took a long time to get good levels of traffic to make the clicks. Participating in online questionnaires would have been a better answer if I had wanted instant money! Good luck!- For more advice on the page rank issue and for methods of making money on the web, including using Google Adsense visit Adsense Hero! Online money making strategies.
By: Sortins Technologies
About the Author:
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your que
SEO tips can help you to get higher Yahoo or Google listings, but only if you use them. Most people think that they know better, even so called SEO professionals who have to use PPC advertising to get their websites listed highly enough to be seen. Who are they to tell us what to do, when they cannot it themselves?
I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3′. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN. I will gladly accept their criticism of my HTML and linking when they achieve the same. Till then, perhaps they would be better buying my book that complaining about my websites!
I would feel more predisposed to them if they stopped criticizing me - I only started to do the same to them when I got sick of their comments when they could not emulate my results. Who am I, a rank amateur, to beat them in the SEO stakes!! In fact, I have been at this for many years.
So, SEO tip #1 - don’t believe anything you are told unless those telling you it have at least one of their websites in the top 5 on all the major search engines for a competitive keyword. Mine has >800 million other results on Google.
Tip 2 - use classical search engine optimization. Use Meta tags because some search engines still use them. The main one is the Description Meta tag - Keywords is not so important but use it anyway. It does not hurt you, so use them.
The third tip relates to the title of your website. There are two points that relate to this. The first is that it should be the best keyword that you can find that relates to your niche or website. That means a good demand and low supply, though too much is sometimes written about this since such keywords are not easy to find. If you can’t something with low supply, just use what you want and decide to compete against them. Somebody has to be top, and why can’t it be you? Too many people give up in SEO too quickly. Probably because we are told not to compete against the big boys - by these big boys!!
The second point is that the title of your site need not be stated on every web page. My web page titles are those of the page, not the site. The graphics are the same, but the title is the keyword that they page is optimized for. Why do otherwise? Yet 99.99% do (just a guess!). Then fourth of my SEO tips is related to the headings on each page. The main title of the page should be in H1 tags, and the heading in H2 tags. You don’t need any more, but any subheadings can go into H3 tags, but should contain text that could be construed as minor keywords.
I might be wrong, but who says? I have found that if you ignore the big guys, and compete against them, they can be beat. Check out what they are trying to sell you and you will notice that much of it is obsolete. Such as site generation and article generation software. That’s not an SEO tip, just a word to the wise, from the not so wise. I have no pretensions, but I know where my home page is on Google - and Yahoo - and MSN. Just search for ‘article services’.
The fifth SEO tip is to use your keywords sparingly. Most people still think that 1% - 3% keyword density is ideal, yet it is actually too much. There is an optimum keyword density that has little to do with the keyword itself, but more to do with contextual relevance of the page content to the topic in hand. Which leads to the sixth of the SEO tips: write naturally and honestly. If you know about your subject, write about it in your own language and don’t try to meet any perceived need for a specific number of so-called keywords within your page content.
Seventh, don’t forget about your links. You can get a higher search engine listing if you have lots of links back to your website from other sites. In fact, the links are from page to page, and you get a proportion of the Google PageRank of the page linking to you, relative to the number of other links leaving that page, and also give the page that you link to a proportion of your PageRank, calculated in the same way. The problem with reciprocal links is that most pages are linked to and from pages with a PageRank of zero, even though the website home page can have a PR of 6 or 7.
SEO tip eight. Use your internal linking to maximise the PageRank of a selected page on your website. You don’t need every page on your site listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo: you only need one. So maximise your efforts on that one page. Visitors that page will then visit the rest of the pages on your website, and so will search engine spiders, so you know that every page on your site will be listed and with a chance of being found in a search.
The important point of that tip is to concentrate on getting one page in the top 10. That’s all you need. You will have links to all your other pages once somebody reaches that page in the top 10. Tip nine: Once you get visitors keep them there. Give them useful content and something to do, even if just to click from page to page. Offer them a free gift for completing a quiz on your topic, or free vacation certificates for certain actions: these are easily found on the internet in a form that you can either post or email for them to print their own. Offer them an opt-in form so that you can keep in touch.
That is the most important tip of all - if you can keep in touch with your visitors after they have left your site, then you can offer them new products as they come along without having to seduce them to visit your website again.
The concept is simple; page rank allows the most important websites to appear at the top of search results. Although you may have seen complicated theories of how page rank works, illustrated by stupendously complicated mathematical formulas, you do not need to be a genius to understand the basic principles. By understanding the basic principles you will then be able to begin working towards achieving a higher page rank for your website, I have achieved a PR 5 for my website and I am no mathematical genius! Basically, Google page rank spans from 0-10. It would be typical for a webpage which has just being indexed by Google to achieve a page rank 0. A webmaster should always be aiming to achieve a higher page rank; this should be an ongoing process. So, how do you go about achieving a higher page rank? Well, a page rank is determined by a web page’s importance, the importance is calculated simply by the number of other web pages which contain a RELEVANT link to the webpage. The logic goes as forth, if many relevant websites contain a link to a web page then the web page must be important. The keyword to remember is RELEVANCY. Google attaches a huge amount of importance to relevancy. There are millions of people who try and achieve a higher Google page rank simply by submitting their website to many, many web directories, this however is really not an effective way of obtaining a high page rank, in many cases the only thing that this will achieve is a reduction in time taken for Google to index your web pages. It may therefore interest you to know that hundreds of links from web directories which link to thousands of other web pages is highly likely to be less beneficial than just one link from another content related website with a high page rank. If you are wanting to obtain a higher page rank in the least possible amount of time your best option is to run a Google search using the keywords for your website. Take note of the top page of results, then, visit the high ranking web pages one by one. Write to the webmasters and ask if you can participate in a link exchange, the answer is likely to be no, however the response to a paid link exchange may be different, and well worth your while. Don’t be afraid of wasting time in this process because even though you may get turned down by many if you are successful with just one highly ranking relevant site, the benefits will be huge and well worth your while in terms of traffic generated. It is also important to realise that Google pays a lot of attention to the title of the link, make sure you include many key words in your link. Personally I have tried in the past just about every method under the sun, (on the web!) in order to try and generate higher page rank. I have attempted buying links from high page rank sites on ebay. However the sites that I chose, despite being PR 6 were not relevant to my website and after 6 months they resulted in no increase to my page ranking. At this point I learnt my lesson about relevancy, in simple terms it goes something like this, ‘If you have a website based on gardening, then there is no point, whatsoever on exchanging links with someone who has a website based on train spotting’. It will get you no where.
If you reap no rewards from talking to webmasters about link exchanges then all is not lost. One of the best methods I use for my website is to write good quality, (I hope) articles, somewhere within the articles I drop reference to my website, in the form of a link, Ad sense Hero! Contains other advice for webmasters Just ‘link’ that. Ha- sorry about the pun. So there you go, write articles and submit them to good quality sites like ezine. Given that your article is good enough to be accepted you will achieve, a relevant link, on a page with relevant content.
There are in fact other factors which affect page rank notably the amount of outbound links from a website. If a highly ranking website has only a handful of links to other pages and one of the links is to your website then the results will be much more beneficial to you than a website that has thousands of outbound links. In effect it seems that Google divides the benefit of the site with page rank between all of the other sites which it links to. This explains why web directories are not beneficial, not only are they irrelevant, they also contain thousands of outbound links. Meaning the page rank benefit is divided between, yeah, you guessed,,, thousands! Time well spent? Nope!
It seems that having new, fresh and original content on your website also increases the frequency at which Google crawls your site, thus making note of new changes. So keep writing and don’t give up. It seems that if you have a site with good regularly updated content, with no tricks necessary, it will at sometime receive traffic; it may just not be as quick as you want and this is why you will probably find yourself following my earlier advice.
Things do get easier, after you have traffic visiting your quality website you will find that your page rank begins to go up on its own. This is because people begin to make links to your website from their freewill in order to make quotes or simply recommend your website to their own visitors. Once the ball is rolling it does get easier. You see?
I hope you enjoyed and benefited from my efforts today! Remember, be patient, things with Google are often slow; rumour has it a Page rank update only occurs every three months,-seems about true in my opinion, and for low page ranking pages apparently a Google bot only crawls, around every three weeks. I don’t have total confidence in the information in this last paragraph; in fact, I don’t think anyone knows for sure. However I do know for sure that my PR 5 website is crawled almost daily by Google’s bot. So just keep on going and be patient! I now make a good income from my site through adsense however it took a long time to get good levels of traffic to make the clicks. Participating in online questionnaires would have been a better answer if I had wanted instant money! Good luck!- For more advice on the page rank issue and for methods of making money on the web, including using Google Adsense visit Adsense Hero! Online money making strategies.
By: Sortins Technologies
About the Author:
Sortins Technologies as the name suggests is an Indian web designing & development company located in Hyderabad that provides professional services in web design, website development, web hosting, website maintenance, website redesigning, web promotion, search engine optimization, multimedia presentations, e-catalogs, e-commerce web development, intranet application development, software development, extranet applications, portals and vortals development from Hyderabad, India.