Have you heard of PageRank™ but you’re not sure what it is. Are you like me and at first glance, you assumed it was just how high your page comes up in search results? Well, guess again. When I got “schooled” in PageRank, frankly, I was surprised by what I didn’t know. So, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned over time with you.

Without getting too technical PageRank is unique to Google and it refers to their “link analysis algorithm”. Huh? Exactly.

Well, to make it as simple as possible, if you think of the web pages that make up the World Wide Web as a group of voters in an election, then each hyperlink to another page counts as a vote. And, the more votes you have, the higher you will score in PageRank. Additionally, if your page or website is linked to from a site that has a high PageRank itself, then that will also improve your score. So, what’s the bottom line? If you have no links to your site from other sites, you will not score in the PageRank system.

(Just a side note here… PageRank actually refers to the name of its developer Larry Page, rather than the idea of  a “page” as the name suggests.)

So, what do you do about your PageRank? Well, first of all, find out what it is. There are tools all over the internet that let you check your site’s PageRank. Here’s one I’ve used called PageRank Checker at http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php. Type in your website address and then wait a minute as it calculates your PageRank.

You’ll receive a score from 1 – 10, the highest being a 10. The score is an assessment of how popular your page is, based on the feedback (i.e. links to it) from the rest of the web. And, it’s also an assessment of how popular the sites that are linking to your site are.  So, if you have a lot of links to your site but the sites that are linking to it don’t have high PageRanks, that all gets calculated using a complicated algorithm that I won’t try to understand or explain here.To give you an idea, Yahoo and Google have really high PageRank scores.

So, what can you do if you have a low score? Well, I certainly don’t have all the answers on this one and I”m trying to figure it out for myself and my clients too. But, here are some ideas:

1. Make sure your site is optimized internally, meaning that you want to make sure the content that you have is really relevant to the audience you are seeking.

2. Make sure your site is optimized externally. What that means is that you want to spend time developing relationships with other websites so they’ll want to link back to your content. No, I don’t mean that you should start pummeling social networks with links to your website. But, I do mean that you should think strategically about networks you can connect into — those that are relevant to your industry or expertise. And, spend some time on those sites and if possible, engage in conversations with the site’s owner or moderator. Find ways to develop partnerships and share information or link back and forth to one another. Like the development of any relationship, this takes time and you want to do it intelligently. So, plan it out first and then start connecting in to the appropriate places.

3. Become an avid writer. Think about where you can share your blog posts or where you can contribute articles and other content related to your industry or expertise. Then start writing and write a lot. Or, if you’re in a position to do so, hire someone to help you with writing and submitting your content. With article submission websites, you have the opportunity to add links to your website. And, the more content you write and the more people like reading what you write, the more popular you will become on those sites. And, more than likely you will start to see an increase in traffic back to your website.

All in all, PageRank in and of itself is interesting but should not become the bane of your business existence. Instead, put forth the effort to improve your PageRank and in doing so, you’ll be implementing a strategic marketing strategy to promote your website and more importantly, your business. Getting the word out about your products and services not only makes you more “popular” but it will help expand your business.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

Tags: Analysis Algorithm, Bottom Line, Check Page Rank, Checker, Developer, First Glance, Goog, Google, Hyperlink, Larry Page, Lot, Php Website, Score, Vote, Web Pages, Website Address, World Wide Web, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.