Written By Trevor A. Winchell Before we begin, let's take a look at the very definition of PageRank as provided by the good folks at Google. PageRank is defined as:
PageRank 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."
What this means is that PageRank acts as a balloting system. Hyperlinks that point to your website from another website are casting a "vote" of support for your site. The more hyperlinks pointing to your website, the more "votes" of support you have, the higher your site PageRank will be.
The question often asked "Is PageRank really all that important?". The answer to this question is widely debated and often a hot topic in forums. The answer to this question is "YES" PageRank is important! In fact, it may be more important than many so-called "experts" would lead you to believe
The Truth About PageRank PageRank is a term that you'll often find associated with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The fact is, PageRank and SEO have very little in common. A website with a high PageRank value may very well be completely off the radar of any organic searches in Google. On the same token, a website with low PageRank can be ranked in the top 10 of Google Searches. For this reason some "experts" believe that PageRank has little to no value as it does not directly reflect in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Although that may be true, their thoughts that PageRank isn't important are very misguided and inaccurate and could result in lost revenue for their clients.
Let's look at this with a theoretical example. Let's assume that everyone in this giant world of ours has been born with two very different degrees of color perception. One-half sees the color of the sky as red and the other half sees the color of the sky as blue. No matter how much the blue sky population tries to convince the red sky population that the sky is REALLY blue, the red sky population insist the sky is REALLY red. Now, are the red sky people wrong in their belief that the sky is red? Their perception that the sky is red is their reality, just as the blue sky population's perception that the sky is blue is their reality. There is no convincing one side or the other of their beliefs. Of course, this is just a silly example to show a point (after all, everyone knows the sky is really pink). What it really comes down to is perception and that is exactly why PageRank is important! Many users and webmasters perceive PageRank as a measuring stick that indicates the strength and popularity of any given website. Perception is reality and that little green bar hanging out in your Google toolbar feeds that perception.
Turning Perception Into Profit Joe user comes upon your site while searching a specific piece of information or product. He doesn't find exactly what he wants but he finds your site pleasant to look at and finds some useful information. He then looks up at his Google toolbar and sees your site has a PageRank (PR) of 0. Joe user is somewhat tech-savvy but not a hard-core techie and not someone that readily keeps up with technology, but he's read enough Google marketing propaganda to know that the little green bar in his Google browser is telling him something about this site. It's telling him "this site is not a popular site!". Joe user decides not to bookmark the site based on his perception that it's not popular. Instead he moves on to a competitors website. Joe user is probably in the minority of users and may not even have a clue what the PR number is really telling him. What he's doing is perceiving it as measuring stick that tells him about a website's quality and popularity. Joe is a casualty of the "PageRank Effect" and a potential sale gone by the way side. The goal of any good website is to convert as many visitors into sales as possible. For that reason alone PageRank should be considered important.
Would You Take Financial Advice From A Bum? The market of your website will be a huge factor in determining how your PageRank value will be interpreted. If your website is designed to sell SEO services to clients and you have a PR0, how do you think that will come across to users? Your average user will not understand that PR0 has no bearing on the quality of your service yet they will use that value against you. Let's look at a real-world example using the Free Links Direct service. Like every new site, Free Links Direct hit the market with a PR0. They engaged in a strong marketing campaign and saw a fair number of sign-ups, but their support team received a very LARGE volume of emails with a similar theme: "If your an SEO company, how come you have a PageRank of 0? How can I trust you to increase my rankings when you yourself can't increase yours?" Even though Free Links Direct was (and still is) a Free SEO service, there was a hesitation by a large number of webmasters to sign-up solely based on the PageRank value. When Google finally updated PageRank for websites (typically happens every 100 days) Free Links Direct shot up from PR0 to PR5 literally overnight. The result? Sign-ups increased by a rate of almost 2 times and the emails about PR virtually disappeared, much to the delight of the support team. The moral? Know your market and understand your PageRank may (and probably will) have an impact on your business.
Want To Trade Links? Not So Fast! Link exchanges are an important aspect of SEO. One of the main factors in determining a website placement in the search results is the number of links pointing to it. Even though reciprocating links (website A links to B and B links back to A) are not weighted as heavily as one-way links (website A links to B and B does not link back), they are still important to your link campaign strategy. Webmasters with high PR websites are unlikely to link exchange with websites that have no or low PR. What this does is put you behind the eight ball. Webmasters with higher PR values will continue to link exchange with other high PR sites and you'll find your site lagging behind. One way to prove this theory is to contact the webmaster of a high PR ranking website (ex: PR6 or higher) and request a link exchange with your low PR website. Most likely you won't even get a response back, and if you do it will be the webmaster declining your exchange request.
Sell That Link Space! Did you know webmasters are willing to pay as much as $100 or more PER MONTH for you to link to them? There is a strong demand in the link market for one-way links. Take a look at the online casino gambling community. Many webmasters are paying hundreds of dollars month over month just to have other gambling related websites link to their own. It's a huge market that you can capitalize on, but NOT if you have a website with little to no PR. If you have a low PR website you might as well forget about selling your link space. The real money will come to those with high PR sites. The higher your PR, the more valuable your link space becomes, and the more money you'll make. Let's assume you have space for 10 links on your home page and you have a PR8. You can expect to fetch up to $100 or more per link each month with a PR8 website. That's a recurring $1000 every month just to link to other websites! You'll be surprised by the amount of revenue you can generate through advertising dollars. If you ignore PR, you'll be loosing out on this potential gold mine.
The benefits of a high PageRank website far outweigh any negatives. In fact, one can say there really are NO negatives in having a website with a high PageRank value. It will create a better perception of your website, lead to potentially more sales and more links, and will allow you to gain revenue through marketing dollars that you never would have achieved with a low ranking website. So, the next time someone tells you "PageRank is NOT important" just nod in agreement. There is no point in trying to change their mind on something they are convinced of. After all, PageRank is mostly about perception and we very well know perception is greater than reality.
Written By Trevor A. Winchell You need SEO for your website, and you’ve done all your homework: keyword research, keyword optimization, onsite SEO (META tags, alt tags, keyword rich content, etc), offsite SEO (linking strategies: articles, press releases, blogs, forums, directories), advertising and so on. There is one more thing you need to complete your efforts: SEO with Google Sitemaps.
First of all you should know what a Google Sitemap is not: a guarantee of getting high ranks in the Google search engine positioning results or higher PageRanks. A Sitemap is not a tool that forces Google robots to crawl on demand, but a tool that makes the crawler more effective by providing a clear structure of your website.
Now let’s take a look at the benefits of Google Sitemaps:
Google Sitemaps is a tool that helps Google index web pages faster. You don’t (and should never) submit your site to Google, but your Sitemap. This Sitemap tells Google about the most important web pages of your website and how often you change them. Basically you help Google crawl your pages smarter.
You can see how Google indexes your website, whether there are crawl errors or not, which of your pages are indexed by Google, how many pages refer to your website and how many link to your website, etc. You will notice that Google shows fewer links than, let’s say Yahoo! That’s because Google has other algorithms and other relevancy queries.
Google Sitemaps and the Google Searcher
You can submit up to 200 sitemaps, so there are some limitations. However, this free Google service has already proved its efficiency and you should really consider using it, at least for the Google Sitemap statistics. Even if you don’t submit a Sitemap you’ll still be able to see what queries and keywords people use when they find your website. You’ll get results from the top searches, top searches from mobile devices and top searchers from the mobile web.
You’ll know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or for other keywords. This will help you optimize your content. If most of your visitors find your website for only one or two fractions of your content – let’s say home-made wine – that’s an important niche and you should probably consider expanding its content to keep visitors interest.
Conclusion: Google Sitemaps is also a tool that enables you to see what’s going on in the mind of a Google searcher.
Google Sitemaps and Page Statistics
Another great advantage is that you no longer need to purchase expensive software to analyze your pages. Google’s page analysis displays some important keyword information: you’ll be able to see what words are most common on your website and what in the anchor text of the links that point to your website.
Google is also reporting on how it crawls your pages. If Google fails at it, you’d definitely want to know about it: to get them properly indexed, you need your pages to be linked and set up correctly. Once Google discovers the errors, they will appear in the page statistics. All you need to do is fix those errors.
Search Engine Optimization in 15 Minutes: How To Guide
Written By Trevor A. Winchell Are you ready to hear something unbelievable? It's not that hard to get website traffic from search engines. All you need to do is follow a certain guidelines from major search engines like Google and follow some of my tips here.
Here are some of my search engine optimization tips for you:
1) Don't pay a company to submit your website to search engines using an automated procedure because this technique often fails; search engines often ignore these submissions. In fact: Website Submission does not work anymore. You should submit your site to these search engines and directories yourself, or pay someone to manually submit your site. You can also look into search engine advertising (using advertising programs like Google AdWord). Yes it costs money but it ensures placement of your business name and website link in a visible position on the search engine page.
2) To optimize your search engine ranking (you want to be in the top 10 and preferably the top five), you must understand how your customers think and want. What does he/she know about your product or service? What keywords will he/she be most likely to type into a search engine? Get to know your current and potential customers so you can answer these questions.
3) Learn more about search engine optimization, even if you plan to work with a web designer. You can find free resources online or buy a book so you can dig into the methodology, find many useful tips about keyword searches and design your keyword references and tags to satisfy the most common words people use to search for your products.
4) Don't think your work is done after you manually submitted your site to search engines. The fact is, you have just begun! Website success takes time and effort. Even if you are recognized by a search engine, and your ranking is high one day or during a given week, it may slip the following week because of new sites or because your competition changes its site to get a better ranking. You must continually monitor your rankings. That's one of the keys to better search engine rankings
5) When you are looking at your website and deciding where to use keywords, keep in mind that you can use keywords in graphics ALT tag, but they must be in captions or in the file title, and not embedded under a graphic as a false lead. Of course, don't bother creating a picture or graphic that contains a word (animated or static). The search engines can't index words that appear inside pictures.
That's it! Here are some of my tips to better search engine optimization. Read this article again, apply them and you will see your website rocket through the roof!
Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder
The Robots.txt protocol, also called the “robots exclusion standard” is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a “Keep Out” sign on your door.
This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.
How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn’t be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it’s difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won’t be read.
In effect, robot.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren’t locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is—if it’s that sensitive, it shouldn’t be on your website to begin with.
Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn’t block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the crawlers rely on the robots to count the keywords, review metatags, titles and crossheads, and even register the hyperlinks.
One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.
To avoid these problems, consider submitting your site to a search engine spider simulator, also called search engine robot simulator. These simulators—which can be bought or downloaded from the internet— use the same processes and strategies of different search engines and give you a “dry run” of how they will read your site. They will tell you which pages are skipped, which links are ignored, and which errors are encountered. Since the simulators will also reenact how the bots will follow your hyperlinks, you’ll see if your robot.txt protocol is interfering with the search engine’s ability to read through all the necessary pages.
It’s also important to review your robot.txt files, which will enable you to spot any problems and correct them before you submit them to real search engines.
Written By: Trevor A. Winchell - Gooyah Search Founder
In the next few years, webmasters will be able to use automated SEO techniques on their websites. This will be done via a content management system, and it will make things much easier and faster. However, this doesn't mean that optimization services will become obsolete. While having an optimized site is good, if visitors can't find it, the site won't get traffic. Because of this, more online companies will begin offering search engine marketing services instead of Search Engine Optimization.
In the middle of the 1990s, most people felt that the only thing you needed to succeed was a website. For some people, this was the truth. By the end of the 1990s, template software was invented. Programs like Dreamweaver and Frontpage made it easier for people who weren't programmers to build their own websites. Once more people begin building their own websites, they next wanted to optimize those sites. To meet this demand, companies started developing software which made it easy for people to design their own websites. To stay competitive, website designers had to change the type of services they offered.
It is now common to use a website which can be edited. CMS has allowed a number of different elements to be automatically generated. Some of these elements include Meta tags, page names, and page titles. Site maps are also being automatically generated. Many experts believe that this is the next stage of SEO technology because they've designed these very programs for their own clients. Once a customer understands how to properly optimize their pages, they will get ahead of those who do not. While SEO is a great service to offer today, it will begin to diminish in importance as more people use the internet and learn how to optimize their own pages without paying a company to do it for them.
At this point, SEO firms will naturally want to shift their attention towards search engine marketing services. This industry will be the replacement for the SEO industry that we see today. If you get into this growing industry now, you and your firm will prosper in the next five years.
