So just what the heck is PageRank and why is it so important to your web site’s traffic? First a little history…. When the founders of Google wrote the academic paper at Stanford that was the basis for the whole idea of Google, that paper dealt largely with PageRank. So you could say that PageRank is the whole basis of Google. So it’s pretty important. PageRank is one of the main factors that Google uses to determine how important a web site is and, therefore, how high to rank that site under a given keyword. Google admits on their web site that they have over 100 different factors that they use to rank a web site. The one we know the most about (and seems to be the most important) is PageRank. (From now on I’ll refer to PageRank as PR). Getting your web site listed at Google is useless if your site’s listed underneath a thousand other sites. In order to make sure people see your web site, you need to be listed within the top 10 or 20 sites listed under a given keyword. That’s where PR comes into play… So what is PR? Good question! PR is a mathematical calculation of how many other web sites are linking to your web site. A web site can have a PR of zero to ten. A PR of zero is bad….a PR of 10 is perfect. I’ve never really seen a PR 10 site (except for Google itself)….it’s very hard to achieve a PR 10. PR 7 is about as good as us ordinary mortals can expect to get…6 is still very good…and a PR of 5 is acceptable. Anything under a 5 and you’re going to want to put some serious work into raising that number. Let me put it into perspective. Let’s say you have a web site about dog grooming. You want to be listed at Google under the keyword phrase “Dog Grooming”. Fair enough. Let’s say that your Dog Grooming web site has a PR of 5. Not bad. Now, your site isn’t the only site in the world about Dog Grooming…. So we head over to Google and type in the phrase “Dog Grooming”….up pops a list of the top ten Dog Grooming web sites. Imagine now that the very first site listed at Google under the phrase “Dog Grooming” has a PR of 7. Remember, we said that your web site has a PR of 5. If you submit your site to Google, would you expect them to list your PR 5 web site above the PR 7 web site that’s already listed there? Nope…. There are exceptions…the highest PR site isn’t always ranked first (remember, Google looks at over 100 different factors when determining how to rank a web site), but chances are, the site with the higher PR is going to be listed first. PR is THAT important. So in that example, you’d have your work cut out for you….you’d need to raise that PR 5 to a good solid PR 6 or 7. But how do you do that? |
