Truths & Myths to Google PageRank Tool Bar

Search engines assign a value to your web site based on the links pointing to it. The most popular term for this kind of ranking is called "PageRank". The PageRank is a value that Google gives to a page based on the number and types of links into a page.

Here’s what Google says about PageRank.

"The heart of our software is the PageRank (™), a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools."

Measuring PageRank

The Google toolbar features a nifty little feature that displays a web site's PageRank - http://toolbar.google.com. Download this to your desktop and you are good to go.

How can you be sure that the PageRank numbers on the Google tool bar are correct? Here are two important points to remember about PageRank.

* Two pages with the same PageRank shown on the toolbar may actually have a very different true PageRanks.

* It gets progressively harder to push a page to the next PageRank level on the toolbar.

Google has a PageRank of 10 as well as Adobe.com. Even though Adobe is an extremely popular web site, it is highly doubtful that they have as many links pointing to them as Google does.

Determining PageRank Factors

There have been thousands of articles written about this. For years search engine specialists have been trying to figure out the formula to Googles' "secret sauce".

From a real-world perspective through managing multiple client web sites, I have determined there are some definite factors that influence web sites Page Rank and SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position).

* Aged Domains
Web sites that have been live for over 2 years. If you have a new web site, register the domain name for at least 5 years.

* Proper Use of Tags
Be sure your title tag and description tag are well-formed and descriptive on each page of your web site. Also make use of the H1 tag as a descriptive header for your web site copy or content.

* Descriptive Content
Fill your web site pages with rich, descriptive content. Don’t worry about writing content for search engines. Write content for your visitors.
Add an article section to your web site. It’s all about content.

* Current Competition
There are many web sites containing content or sales information that are highly competitive. Some of these include Jewelry Sales, Women’s Fashion, Real Estate and Mortgage companies.
If you have a web site in this industry you have to carve-out an unexploited niche. For example, if you are in a highly competitive city for real estate you should try targeting sales in popular sub-divisions.

* Content and Linking
Write or re-publish articles about everything relating to your business. Then trade or place related web site links on these same article pages, thus driving visitors and search "bots" to your web site.

* Digital Foot Traffic
Tell as many people as you can about your site. The more traffic you drive to your web site the higher your PageRank will climb. To demonstrate the hard truth of this, go to milliondollarhomepage.com. Milliondollarhomepage has an unbelievable PageRank of 7.

Started on a whim and a lark, a young university student sold one million pixels at a dollar a pixel and made $1 million.

In January 2006 his story was covered by the BBC and other major US cable news channels. Take a look at the spike in visitor traffic when his web address received air-time in mid-January. http://www.alexa.com//traffic_details

Who knows, maybe someone will mention your web site on Oprah. It doesn’t hurt to toot-your-own-horn.

Fortune favors the bold.