What is PageRank?

Curiosity about getting your page to the top of the Google search is not rocket science; in fact, Google even offers a PageRank tool that can be downloaded for free. If you are running a website or Internet business then PageRank is a vital tool to measure how much traffic you are really getting.

Google is known for providing the best results on internet searches. This is because of PageRank’s ability to determine the value of a website for any given search term or keyword phrase. “This value is determined by how websites link together with the more popular (and theoretically better) sites receiving more links. It’s these incoming links that help the site have a high PageRank value and thus display higher up in search results.”

Here is a brief description of PageRank, written by the Google team:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

An important key note to understand is that it is a combination of variables that determine how well your site performs on Google. These are the most important variables to worry about:

• Incoming links to your site.
• The relevancy (to your site’s theme) of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.
• The keywords that other sites use to link to your site.
• The keywords on your website in particular in places like page titles and headlines.

Not all of the above points are controllable, but some are, like keywords in headlines. The bottom line to PageRank is that all these variables listed determine how high your site shows up in the search engine results. Therefore it is important to utilize this information for your competitive advantage- no matter how tech-savvy you are.

Information Provided By: Entrepreneurs-journey.com

Written By: Samantha J. Stephan