Don’t Be Outranked!
Post Excerpt:
Generating good traffic to your web site has been a huge topic for a long time, and much has been written and discussed about it. A great proportion of the traffic to our web sites comes from the search engines, when people are looking for something in particular. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t Google something, it just seems to be one of the major ways people surf the web. One of the factors that influences your web page position in the search results is your page rank, which is the topic of this post.
Generating good traffic to your web site has been a huge topic for a long time, and much has been written and discussed about it. A great proportion of the traffic to our web sites comes from the search engines, when people are looking for something in particular. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t Google something, it just seems to be one of the major ways people surf the web. One of the factors that influences your web page position in the search results is your page rank, which is the topic of this post.
Let’s try a quick exercise – go to Google, or your favorite search engine, and type in “professional photographer your town” (replacing “your town” with the name of your town or city, of course).
Is your web site in the list? If it’s on the first page then you’re doing very well. If not, then don’t despair; there are ways to get it there if you follow some of the tips on this blog and you are patient.
Page Ranking:
Where your web site appears in the search listing for a given set of keywords is a result of the ranking given to your site by the search engine. This is a complex subject, but here’s my condensed version:
“A page’s rank is a score calculated by the search engine based on the number and ranking of incoming links, the number of outgoing links and the relevance and frequency of the keywords used on the page itself.”
Okay, not very condensed, and I’m sure there’s probably a better way to explain it than that, but I did my best. Even Google have a hard time explaining it in ways normal people can understand, and the actual formula is a secret – although some brainy people have produced good approximations of it by deduction.
In Google-speak, page rank is a scale from 0 – 10, with 10 being the most important. There are very few pages with a rank of 10 and (oddly enough) Google itself is one of those (perhaps a perk of being the actual search engine). No one outside of Google really knows how the system works completely (and it’s changing all the time anyway), but it’s pretty much agreed that the scale is non-linear. By this, I mean it takes a lot more effort to go from rank 2 to rank 3 than it does from rank 1 to rank 2. Most photographer web sites that I’ve seen rank anywhere from 0 to 4, with 2 being the most common.
When the rank of your page is being calculated, the number and rank of each of your incoming links is taken into account. High-ranking pages that link to yours are more valuable than those from lower-ranking pages. Highly ranked pages will therefore contribute more rank points to your page than lower-ranked ones will. This is what people mean when talking about quality links. It’s probably better to have 1 link from a page with a rank of 4, than 10 links from pages that only rank 1.
When finding sites to exchange links with, consider the rank of the linking site as well as the relevance to the material on your own page. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, you can see the ranking of any page you visit. Deciding on whether or not to link up is a valued judgment based on a qualitative assessment of the relevance and ranking. A high relevance with a low rank could still be worth linking to – just avoid low relevance / low rank sites as these may not add much worth to your rank.
Something else to avoid are “link farms” – sites dedicated solely to providing links to other sites, with no actual content of their own. These web sites might start off okay, but can be penalized by Google for trying to skew the system. Your site might in turn be penalized by association with them, so avoid them at all costs.
Get Your Page Rank Here! Get ‘em While They’re Hot!
When you link to another web site you’re effectively donating some of your page rank to the other site – this is why reciprocal links are so important. With a link back to your site, you each gain a link but don’t lose any page rank in the process. But a link to another site with no reciprocal link causes you to leak page rank. If you do want to link to someone who doesn’t link back to you, then you can use the rel=”nofollow” syntax in the HTML <a> tag. This will instruct the search engine spider to not follow the link when crawling your site. The basic syntax of that is:
<a href=”http://www.somesite.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Click Here</a>
In summary, page rank is a crucial component to your web site’s success in the search engine game, and it determines how high you can climb up the results ladder. The main way to increase your page rank is to exchange links with other quality sites with high relevance. Also, don’t forget that the actual content on your site is important, too – it must be rich content that people would find relevant to their search and that they actually would want to read.
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