Step Wise SEO

Simply stated, Google is the standout leader in search today. It has the most eyeballs and the most new trends, and it’s the only search engine with its own entry in the dictionary.

Once a search-only entity, Google now offers a mail service, a map service, and a traffic and conversion tracking service, not to mention a diverse menu of specialty search options, including video, image, blog, and local.

Google has been an all-out trendsetter in the evolution of the search algorithm. Link Google has been an all-out trendsetter in the evolution of the search algorithm.

The current hot topics at Google are its new SEO-friendly products. One is Google Sitemaps, a service that allows the site owner to submit a list of URLs and other factors to Google for improved indexing (but not improved ranks).

And the other is Google Analytics, a robust conversion tracking service. Products like these have been around for years. So why are they big news in the SEO community? Two reasons: They’re free, and they come from Google.

PageRank, ShmageRank
Google’s PageRank is a measurement of a page’s worth based on the quantity and quality of both incoming and outgoing links.

The concept behind PageRank is that each link to a page constitutes a vote, and Google has a sophisticated and automated way of tallying these votes, which includes looking at a vast universe of interlinking pages.

Google awards PageRank on a scale of 0 to 10; a PageRank value of 10 is the most desirable and extremely rare.

Like the Richter scale, the PageRank scale is not linear, so the difference between 4 and 5 is much greater than the difference between 3 and 4.

More often than not, pages with high PageRank have higher Google rankings than pages with low PageRank.

And therein lies the link obsession. Throughout the SEO community, the scrambling for, trading, and even selling of links became such a focus over the past several years that Google modified its system and began to devalue certain kinds of links.

It’s widely accepted, for example, that links from content-deficient “link farm” websites do not improve a page’s PageRank, and getting a link from a page with high PageRank but irrelevant content (say, a popular comic book site that links to a forklift specifications page) won’t either.

Google now displays updated PageRank values at infrequent intervals to discourage constant monitoring.

It’s good to get links to your site, but obsessive link building to the point of excluding other areas of SEO is a waste of time. Keep a holistic head on your shoulders and remember these points:

• Google’s ranking algorithm is not based entirely on inbound links.
• A high PageRank does not guarantee a high Google rank.
• A PageRank value viewed today may be up to three months old.

PageRank is still a fairly good indication of how Google regards your website’s pages. But in the Right Now of SEO, think of PageRank as a hobby, not a religion.