If you haven’t done the basic on-page seo tactics, start with our how to improve seo article by researching keywords. Next step is to distribute each keyword to your web pages in a relevant and natural manner. More on that subject in our seo optimization article titled keyword distribution map. Once you’ve gone through both of these exercises, you’re ready to apply the results from the distribution map to your pages. Now you’re ready to start a link building strategy to further improve your site’s search engine rank, and you’ll use those keywords you found through your research.
Key-worded anchor text links pointing to your pages are more important than PageRank. By that I mean PageRank is calculated in large part by how many links are pointing to a web page. Spend more time and efforts building links to your web pages and less time worrying about what you PageRank is.
PageRank
Are you wondering what PageRank is? Named after Larry Page, one of Google's founders, this is a logarithmic scale that categorizes web pages numerically by an unknown formula. The formula is secret - we do know that Google's PageRank looks at links pointing to a webpage, and uses that as the basis of its PageRank.
TrustRank
TrustRank is also important, a concept that came from Stanford and Yahoo! and is almost certainly used by Google's algorithm.
Links from sites with a high TrustRank are worth more PageRank than links from sites with low TrustRank. TrustRank is shared from site to site. The farther away from a site with a high TrustRank a link gets, the less value it carries as a trusted site. Highly respected educational and major newspaper sites tend to carry high TrustRank, as do .gov sites.
Proof
One of the best ways to illustrate how important keyworded links pointing to your site are to your site’s search engine rank is what is known as a “Google Bomb.”
Do a search for “click here” and you’ll find that the 1st or 2nd ranked site, Adobe Reader’s download page, doesn’t even have that search term anywhere on it. That is a “Google Bomb.”
Think of it as a technique rather than a trick, and get a keyword phrase relevant to your site on as many external pages as you can, and you’ll improve that pages search engine ranking.
Summary - So what do we need to know about PageRank?
Google and the other search engines are looking at a lot of different variables in order to rank pages, not just PageRank. I think of PageRank as a tiebreaker. If you have two pages that Google thinks match a search query equally well, the one with the higher PageRank ranks highest. But it's not going to rank one page higher than another based on PageRank if the page isn't as good of a match with the search query. This is all a little complicated, but we can simplify it. What does all this tell us from an SEO standpoint? It tells us that we need key-worded links, and the more the better.
In the next article, we’ll examine strategies to analyze your website’s incoming links (like an anchor tag audit exercise) as well as ways to improve your search engine optimization link building efforts.
If you found this article helpful please let me know. If you have any suggestions to further the discussion, I'd be happy to hear them.
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