As popularity of the Internet grows, businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the need to be on the first page of Google. But how do you get to the top of page 1?
Of course, in addition to solid construction, focus on H1, H2 and H3 tags and well written copy, your website needs that little bit extra to achieve page one ranking, certainly when it comes to very competitive search terms.
That little bit extra is you website’s PageRank.
Named after Google’s co-founder Larry Page (and not ‘page’ as in ‘web page’), PageRank is how Google sorts the relevant and popular from the unrelevant and unpopular in order to give what it believes is the best results return for its users.
Search engine giant Google explains PageRank in considerable detail here, but in short, it seems that Google’s PageRank system uses the Internet’s vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.
In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to web page B as a vote, by web page A, for web page B. However, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a web 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.”
So, whilst all links from other (relevant) websites to your website are undeniably important, get your site to the top of page one by having high ranking sites link to yours. That’s where the challenge lies for all of us.
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I agree that site construction and keyword targeting within the coding on the page are vitally important.
Links: the number of links, how many there are on the linking page, and most importantly the anchor text; are also key to the search engine results. Thrown into this mix is the quality of the individual page - which could be measured by Page Rank.
But PR this is a loose quantifier. I’ve regularly seen sites with a PR1 beating a PR5 on the search engine results.
My own site, which has only increased in size and links, has fluctuated between a PR1 and PR5 over the past years, now it’s a feeble PR3. But this has had no correlation with positioning, traffic, hits or enquiries?
If I was looking for a site to gain links from, obviously the higher the PR, the more valuable it would be worth. But the PR is so hard to quantify. The principles are right, but they way Google rewards them (if any) are an unknown.
I would use PR as a rough rule of thumb to the quality of the page you want to get a link from, and not worry about it as the judgment of your own page.