A lot of website owners are upset or puzzled when their website’s Google PageRank goes down or does not rise. Is it worth losing any sleep over changes in that green line and number that appear in a Google tool bar at the top of your browser? I think that excessive worry or thought about PageRank is not constructive, and it is better to put it all in perspective by taking a rational look at what PageRank is and what it is not.

First of all the concept behind PageRank is indeed at the heart of Google’s ranking process. The Google founders came from academia and they noticed that in many academic documents some sources were continually cited. They reasoned that if a particular document such as a book or research paper was mentioned in many places then it must be important. They applied this to the web and assumed that if one website links to another it is in fact, giving a “vote” for that site. A website that has many incoming links must have a certain degree of importance. In the current Google algorithm the quantity and quality of incoming links is certainly a factor in deciding the ranking of a particular website for any given search-query.

Think about it. In the early days of the web people would build websites and then they would tell their visitors to check out other “cool” sites and they would link to these sites. This is the process of natural linking and it still goes on. If you really have good content, people will link to you without letting you know. Similarly, if your name is Bob Dylan and your website is www.bobdylan.com, thousands of people will link to you without you having to send a cheesy email begging for a link.

Various government agencies, educational institutions, established companies and anyone else who is “big” in the “real world” is likely to also be big on the Internet simply by virtue of their previous fame and accomplishment. Google’s ranking system took this into consideration and this is one of the reasons why Google is currently the number one search engine. It gives better results and that is why people use it.

But, does that mean that only the big players can be seen on the net? Far from it. While there is a difference between one guy working in his house with one computer and a corporate giant with a whole staff, and this is indeed reflected in rankings, the Internet provides a much leveler playing field than in yesteryear. Prior to 1995, it would have been very hard for someone to spread their news and views far and wide as bloggers do today. It costs millions of dollars to publish a daily newspaper or to print and circulate a magazine, but it costs far less to publish a website or a blog, and lots of “little guys” have taken advantage of the power of the Internet.

But what about PageRank, how much of it do I really need to get my site noticed? For those who are not familiar with the PageRank system. Google supplies a tool bar which you can download and install on your browser. If you make a complete installation with all the advanced features, then every time you open a new website you will see a green and white bar with the label PageRank. Put your mouse on the bar and you will see a number from 0 to 10. If a website is not indexed by Google or banned by Google, the bar may be grey or all white.

But what do the numbers mean? I had a client who was worried about his number 3 PageRank figure and based on my observation I answered him with my unofficial view on the rankings. Here is how I currently see it:

PageRank 0-2 shows that a site does not have many links and needs work, However, and this a big “however,” it may not really affect your search engine rankings. I have a client with a page rank of 2 and his site ranks well, even number one, for several search terms in a fairly competitive industrial category. So PageRank is not everything; it may have an impact on your rankings and traffic, but in some cases it may not matter. In any case if you have a PageRank of 0-2, you can work on it through proper link building activity which I will explain at the end of the article.

PageRank 3 can be OK in some cases but in highly competitive industries you should work to improve it.

PageRank 4 is quite a normal number and indicates that you have enough links in either quantity or quality to make your site competitive.

PageRank 5 indicates that a site has many links or links from authoritative sites, and that Google has good “trust” in the site. It is a respectable and attainable PageRank.

PageRank 6 is very difficult to attain. This rank indicates that the site has many links and links from respected places. Remember the example of www.bobdylan.com, which I mentioned above; it has a PageRank 6, so you can get an idea of the difficulty involved.

PageRank 7-10 is usually earned by large and established institutions or websites which have tremendous authority, due to the quantity and quality of the incoming links. It is extremely difficult to attain this ranking. You really have to be special to get it.

So, don’t worry excessively about PageRank. First look at your traffic, then look at your sales and finally at your bottom line. They are the important numbers to watch. If you want to increase your traffic and also PageRank, then here are a few steps that you can take:

1. Add content to your website. Make your website so good and so useful that people will link to you without you asking for a link.
2. Write articles and get them published on other websites and blogs with a link back to your site.
3. Distribute online press releases
4. Judiciously exchange links, or even better, exchange content (containing links back to your site) with other websites.
5. Get your site listed in online directories.

These efforts will certainly help you to build targeted traffic, and they most probably will also help you to increase your PageRank as well.

By Donald Nelson
Donald Nelson is a search engine optimization specialist and the publisher of the A1-Article Directory, a source of content for website owners and blog publishers.

When it comes to SEO not all of us have the time to be experts. At some point the real “gurus” of SEO and other topics are the people with a whole lot of time on their hands. This list, put together with the everyday webmaster in mind, drives home some absolutely crucial points that you should keep in mind when optimizing your pages for valuable search rankings.

1. Check Search Engine Crawl Error Pages
It’s important to monitor search engine crawl error reports to keep on top of how your site and its pages are performing. Monitoring error reports can help you determine when and where Googlebot or another crawler is having trouble indexing your content - which can help you find a solution to the problem.

2. Create/update robots.txt and sitemap files
These files are supported by major search engines and are incredibly useful tools for ensuring that crawlers index your important site content while avoiding those sections/files that you deem to be either unimportant or cause problems in the crawl process. In many cases we’ve seen the proper use of these files make all the difference between a total crawl failure for a site and a full index of content pages which makes them crucial from an SEO standpoint.

3. Check Googlebot activity reports
These reports allow you to monitor how long it’s taking Googlebot to access your pages. This information can be very important if you are worried that you may be on a slow network or experiencing web server problems. If it is taking search engine crawlers a long time to index your pages it may be the case that there are times when they “time out” and stop trying. Additionally, if the crawlers are unable to call your pages up quickly there is a good chance users are experiencing the same lag in load times, and we all know how impatient internet users can be.

4. Check how your site looks to browsers without image and JavaScript support
One of the best ways to determine just what your site looks like to a search engine crawler is to view your pages in a browser with image and JavaScript support disabled. Mozilla’s Firefox browser has a plug-in available called the “Web Developer Toolbar” that adds this functionality and a lot more to the popular standards-compliant browser. If after turning off image and JavaScript support you aren’t able to make sense of your pages at all, it is a good sign that your site is not well-optimized for search. While images and JavaScript can add a lot to the user experience they should always be viewed as a “luxury” - or simply an improvement upon an already-solid textual content base.

5. Ensure that all navigation is in HTML, not images
One of the most common mistakes in web design is to use images for site navigation. While for some companies and webmasters SEO is not a concern and therefore they can get away with this, for anyone worried about having well-optimized pages this should be the first thing to go. Not only will it render your site navigation basically valueless for search engine crawlers, but within reason very similar effects can usually be achieved with CSS roll-overs that maintain the aesthetic impact while still providing valuable and relevant link text to search engines.

6. Check that all images include ALT text
Failing to include descriptive ALT text with images is to miss out on another place to optimize your pages. Not only is this important for accessibility for vision-impaired users, but search engines simply can’t “take a look” at your images and decipher the content there. They can only see your ALT text, if you’ve provided it, and the association they’ll make with the image and your relevant content will be based exclusively on this attribute.

7. Use Flash content sparingly
Several years ago Flash hit the scene and spread like wild fire. It was neat looking, quick to download and brought interactivity and animation on the web to a new height. However, from an SEO standpoint, Flash files might as well be spacer GIFs - they’re empty. Search engines are not able to index text/content within a Flash file. For this reason, while Flash can do a lot for presentation, from an accessibility and SEO standpoint it should be used very sparingly and only on non-crucial content.

8. Ensure that each page has a unique <title> and meta description tag
Optimization of <title> tags is one of the most important on-page SEO points. Many webmasters are apparently unaware and use either duplicate <title> tags for multiple pages or do not target search traffic at all within this valuable tag. Run a search on a competitive keyword of your choice on Google - click on the first few links that show up and see what text appears in the title bar for the window. You should see right away that this is a key place to include target keywords for your pages.

9. Make sure that important page elements are HTML
The simple fact to keep in mind when optimizing a page is that the crawlers are basically only looking at your source code. Anything you’ve put together in a Flash movie, an image or any other multimedia component is likely to be invisible to search engines. With that in mind it should be clear that the most important elements of your page, where the heart of your content will lie, should be presented in clean, standards-compliant and optimized HTML source code.

10. Be sure to target keywords in your page content
Some webmasters publish their pages in hopes that they will rank well for competitive keywords within their topic or niche. However, this will simply never happen unless you include your target keywords in the page content. This means creating well-optimized content that mentions these keywords frequently without triggering spam filters. Any way you cut it you’re going to need to do some writing - if you don’t like doing it yourself it’s a good idea to hire a professional copy writer. Simply put: without relevant content that mentions your target keywords you will not rank well.

11. Don’t use frames
There is still some debate as to whether frames are absolutely horrible for SEO or whether they are simply just not the best choice. Is there really a difference? Either way, you probably don’t want to use frames. Crawlers can have trouble getting through to your content and effectively indexing individual pages, for one thing. For another, most functionality that the use of frames allows is easily duplicated using proper CSS coding. There is still some use for a frames-based layout, but it is still better to avoid it if at all possible.

12. Make sure that your server is returning a 404 error code for unfound pages
We’ve all seen it. We’re browsing around at a new or familiar site, clicking links and reading content, when we get the infamous blank screen that reads “404 page not found” error. While broken links that point to these pages should definitely be avoided you also don’t want to create a “custom error page” to replace this page. Why? Well, it’s simple: if you generate a custom error page, crawlers can spend time following broken links that they won’t know are broken. A 404 error page is easily recognizable, and search engine crawlers are programmed to stop following links that generate this page. If crawlers end up in a section of your site that is down through an old link that you missed, they might not spend the time to index the rest of your site.

13. Ensure that crawlers will not fall into infinite loops
Many webmasters see fit to include scripting languages, such as Perl, Php and Asp to add interactive functionality to their web pages. Whether for a calendar system, a forum, eCommerce functionality for an online store, etc. scripting is used quite frequently on the internet. However, what some webmasters don’t realize is that unless they use robots.txt files or take other preventative measures search engine crawlers can fall into what are called “infinite loops” in their pages. Imagine, if you will, a script that allows a webmaster to add a calendar to one of his pages. Now, any programmer worth his salt would base this script on calculations - it would auto-generate each page based on the previous month and a formula to determine how the days and dates would fall. That script, depending on sophistication, could plausibly extend infinitely into the past or future. Now think of the way a crawler works - it follows links, indexes what it finds, and follows more links. What’s to stop a crawler from clicking “next month” in a calendar script an infinite number of times? Nothing - well, almost nothing. Crawlers are well-built programs that need to run efficiently. As such they are built to recognize when they’ve run into an “infinite loop” situation like this, and they will simply stop indexing pages at a site that is flagged for this error.

By Mike Tekula
Mike Tekula handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance for NewSunGraphics, a Long Island, New York firm offering Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using full CSS layouts and all things web design/development.

Before I get started, it is worth defining social media. It has become a widely used and abused term that means different things to different people.

My definition of social media is:

‘online technologies and practices that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites’.

At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.

Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted by word-of-mouth.

If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?

How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?
The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.

1) Create a MySpace Page
MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.

Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.

Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your list of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.

2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages
A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lists and benefit from other people’s recommendations. If your website has free content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.

There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:

• Digg - www.digg.com
• Technorati – www.technorati.com
• Del.icio.us – del.icio.us
• Reddit – www.reddit.com

However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.

3) Add an RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.

Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.

Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner to encourage distribution and interest.

4) Email to a Friend
Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an ‘Email a Friend’ link to all of your content pages.

5) Add a Forum
Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.

The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don’t feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, spam and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don’t bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.

Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin. More technical people can use a free opensource solution such as PHPBB.

You can register your forum with BoardTracker to make it easier for people to find.

6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos
It has never been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making Money on eBay, you could create a short video on “How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings”. Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.

Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.

7) Share Your Photos
If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr and PhotoBucket. For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.

8 ) Create a Blog
Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.

Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their audience.

Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.

You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress or Blogger. For a managed service, try Typepad.

In many ways, today’s social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created - of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.

One last point before I finish. It’s really a word of warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it. If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.

By Miles Galliford
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profit on the web. Website: SubHub.com     Feed: SubHub Articles Feed