Page Rank

A popular term that is used a lot in webpage marketing is PageRank. The term itself has been trademarked and is used by Google to differentiate between the millions of pages on the Internet today. Google Page Rank is a term associated with the mathematical value a website has that is directly related to its’ popularity or importance. It is important to understand how PageRank works to ensure that the local business directories you are listed in and the local business listings you are associated with are helping you gain traffic as well as rank.

Basically a man named Larry Page co-founder of Google, created the link analysis algorithm that Google uses. Oddly enough the patent for it is held by Stanford who then leases the rights to Google. It uses a ranking system that is a bit complex but basically counts sites that link to your site and considers their rankings as well as yours, along with traffic to create a rank. The idea of the founder was to make a perfect search engine that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want” (Larry Page).

What is Your Rank?

There is a very useful and free website, www.Prchecker.info that you can use to check your website’s PageRank. You should also check the ranks of any of the local business listings that link to you. Then you should take a peek at any local business directories or national directories you are linked with. Obscure, little known, or little used sites can actually cause a lower PageRank. If you are associated with any of these it might be beneficial to remove your site from them. Not all links are good links.

Searches are constantly updated as the Google engines crawl over sites. They review pages and categorize them along with considering the relevance of the information on the site coupled with its’ comprehensiveness. By constantly refreshing its’ searches, PageRank is able to help provide an accurate picture to a searcher.

Ways to Increase your PageRank

Meta Keyword Tags – Your site should have appropriate Meta keyword tags that are relevant to what you do and offer or who you are. If you are not sure, check with your web designer. Or you can go to your Home Page and view the page info (F12 with the current Internet Explorer). You can view the page coding and peek at the exact Meta words are used.

Use at least one link to Google – By including one link back to Google (which is a 10) it bumps your rank up due to association with the big dog.

Link back to people who link to you – If other sites link to you, make sure you link back to them in some manner. This cross-linking is a symbiotic enhancement to help you both with traffic and rank.

There are many benefits of high inbound links from quality sites such as local business listings and local business directories like Elapages.com. By checking the PageRank of these sites you can ensure that they are helping you and not hurting you in the way Google looks at and ranks your website.

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