What is Google PageRank™? - A simple explanation for the newbie Online Marketer

The success of your online marketing depends on the PageRank given to each webpage on your website by the Search Engines. The position of your page on the Search Engine Results Page for your keywords depends to some extent on the PageRank of your page.

Actually PageRank™ is Google's way of determining your site's authority value within a field/industry by identifying the authority value of those linking to it.  Higher your PageRank, better for you.

Note: Google affords each individual web page its own PageRank.

Ok, now that you know what PageRank™(PR) is, lets talk about why it is useful to you. Here is an example to make it easier.

1) Let us say you search for a particular term, eg. "Movie Tickets Avatar". The first few search results that appear on the Organic listings belong to www.movietickets.com

Note:I have no business relationship with www.movietickets.com. I just picked it as an example because it came up at the top of the SERP when I searched for the above term. Lets stop here for a moment and go see how Google decided to show www.movietickets.com at the top.

1) Google has in its wanderings around the web, crawled through the sites www.movietickets.com, hollywood.com, westcoastmediasolutions.com, moviesmusicgamesandmore.com, cinerama.com, starbuzz.com etc. It knows intimately the contents of every reachable page on each of these sites, the links on each and to whom each page links.

2) What Google found was that each of these sites(and numerous others) have one or more links to the site www.movietickets.com. Google takes note of this.

3) Google finds that each of these sites I mentioned above linking to www.movietickets.com have a medium (5) to high PageRank(over 7).

4) Google also finds a few pages that seem to pertain to Avatar - the movie.

How does Google know that these pages are talking about the movie Avatar?

Let's go back to Google to find out. http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

Ok, Now you know how Google knows about what's on your page. Moving on...

5) When you typed in your search term, "Movie Tickets Avatar", Google merely checked its internal database for websites that carry the term Movie, Tickets, Avatar.

6) It returns all the websites it finds in its SEarch Results Page(SERP). The websites with the highest PageRank are displayed right on top.

Having high quality internal facing links is probably the most important factor influencing your website's PageRank. Now, an important item to remember is that PageRank also depends on the content of your page and the content and PR of the pages that your page links to.

Till sometime in the recent past, Google used to display the PageRank as part of the Google Webmaster Tools. It has now been removed from the tools, apparently because webmasters spend way too much time obsessing over it while not paying enough attention to the other factors.

Ok, So what do you do to improve your PageRank?

Simple. Get pages with very high PR to link to you. Uh? Did I say simple? Well, not quite so. There is a bit of work involved and if you are a small business, you better get started soon.

What kinds of pages have high PageRank?

The following pages are often seen to have a high PageRank.

•  non-commercial pages
• social media sites
• wikis
• blogs
• article directories
• web directories
• others generated by user contribution

How do I check PageRank of my pages?

 1)You can use the Google Toolbar available at www.google.com/toolbar. Go to this site and click the Install Google Toolbar button.

2)Use the PR checker tool : http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php. Enter the page address you want to check PageRank for. Enter captcha code and click the Check PR button.

3) If you are serious about building your online business, you need to know about more things than merely how much PR your webpage has. You need a serious link research tool that gives you a ton of other information about your website as well as your competition. The one I use is from http://www.eliteseotool.com. Methinks its good value for your money.

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