What is Page Rank? Why should I care?

Those that are new to the idea of SEO may be asking the question, “What is Page Rank?”. Page Rank is a number from 0 to 10 that shows how important a website is on the internet (in the eyes of the Google search engine).

Page Rank is determined by the number and quality of links that a website receives from other websites. For instance, an SEO website’s Page Rank is raised more with links from SEO related websites than it is when it receives links from websites about irrelevant topics such as sports or food.

Another thing that may affect your Page Rank is the number of outbound links on the website that links to you. A website that has 5 or 10 outbound links will have a greater affect on your Page Rank then a website with 100 outbound links.

One thing to be careful of when you are trying to attain a good Page Rank is the sites that you link to. If you link to sites that have been penalized by Google for any reason, you may be penalized as well. A good example of a bad site to link to is a link farm. A link farm is a group of websites that link to every other website in that same group. A website will not be penalized however, if it has been linked to by a penalized site. This is a long as you have not linked back to that website.

Hopefully with this post you will understand what Page Rank is and how it is determined. If you have any questions or input, feel free to leave a comment below.

Google PageRank: It means nothing!….?

I was reading blog posts about google page rank today and I saw a blog title that caught my attention. The title was “Google PageRank: It means nothing!”. The blogger’s reason for saying this was that a member of a forum mentioned that while his page rank dropped from 5 to 0, his traffic had seen an increase and not a decrease. You can see the whole forum discussion here. It’s a very interesting discussion and I do recommend that you take a chance to read over it. Decide for yourself if you still think you need to depend on page rank to know where your site stands on the internet.

Personally, I also feel that page rank is slightly insignificant. I haven’t been active with my blog and my page rank has been through many changes. I checked my page rank while I was away from wordpress and saw it go from 5 to 0 and to, at the time of this post, 3. Comparing this to my web stats, the number of site visitors that I had was related to the page rank I had. The only exception is that when my page rank was 0, I did have a constant flow of visitors daily close to what I have at the time of this post. I will probably still continue to check my page rank and try to raise it now that I am active again.

But see for yourself how much your page rank actually reflects your site performance. Compare your change in page rank to your change in traffic, customers, etc.

A Look Into Click Through Rates

    In my previous article I discussed what SEO is in general. Now I will discuss one of the key aspects of SEO, which is Click Through Rate. After I discuss what this is, we will look into what you can do to help your click through.

So the first question is, what is a click through rate? A click through rate is how often a link to your site gets clicked on. This is in regards to a search into a search engine.  Everytime someone searches for something on a search engine and your website is clicked on from the others in the listing, it will affect your click through rate.  Your click through rate is also affected for each time your site isn’t clicked.

So what happens if you have a low click through rate? Well if your website is ranked considerably high, your sites rank will in general go down for that certain search term. If your click through rate is considerably high though, it will affect your site ranking in a positive way.

Now what are the ways for you to gain a higher click through rate for a certain term? The first thing to do is have relevant content. There is no reason for anyone to click on your site if your site has nothing to do with what they are looking for.  Also, it would be a good idea to put that term in your <title> tag. A lot more can be done to improve your click through rate, but I’ve already discussed a lot, but may write more on the subject later.