Articles in The 'pagerank' Tag

Bolster Your Google+ Profile

by Michael Bergbauer

For most people, putting time into meticulously crafting all the elements of a social media profile is a task that only falls into the purview of a full-fledged social media campaign. However, as Google+ has gained steam, the impact of profile pages have expanded.

This is mostly because of AuthorRank – an unverified ranking signal that bears resemblance to PageRank, except that it measures the authority and influence of an individual author, rather than that of an entire website. Similar to increasing your PageRank for SEO purposes, there are advantages to increasing your AuthorRank.

One of the key methods for increasing your AuthorRank is optimizing your Google+ page. Originally, tying your content back to your Google+ profile was simply a means of establishing AuthorRank for yourself. However, as the signal has grown in complexity, even more factors of AuthorRank are tied to Google+. The stronger your Google+ profile, the better your Author Rank. As you go about crafting your Google+ profile, keep these points in mind:

• The “About” section: Keywords and hyperlinks placed in your About section can play an important role in your profile’s search ranking. Try to use relevant keywords in your Story, Work, and Education sections. Also, don’t forget that you can use HTML in these sections to create hyperlinks that are optimized with appropriate keywords. Take note though, that URLs displayed under the Links section of your profile are no-follow links. While it may seem like that section is meant to optimize your top links, it’s not very useful for that task.

• Build big circles: While the number of users in your circles does not directly affect ranking factors for your profile, it is still important to have lots of users. When more people link back to your profile and posts, that’s the number that helps Google sit up and take notice.

• Optimize your posts: You can give your Google+ posts titles by putting an asterisk at the beginning and end of the first sentence. Just like in HTML titles, keywords play an important role in post titles. Also, make sure to place URL’s in the link section. If they are placed in the body of the post, they will become no-follow links.

• Consistent use: A consistently updated website has much better ranking potential than a stale, static one – that’s why we recommend blog writing to so many of our clients. Consistent updates to your Google+ page have a similar effect; not to mention that new posts are new opportunities to strengthen some of the above points.

By focusing more effort toward optimizing your Google+ profile, you’ll be able to increase your relevance with Google as a web-author. The initial set-up may be a bit time consuming, but once it’s done the content you produce will be able to reach an even wider audience.

PageRank Still has Some Use for SEO

by Michael Bergbauer

Back in Google’s very early days, Larry Page developed an algorithm with fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin. It was dubbed PageRank (which ended up being a wonderful name because it is a metric that measure web pages) and became a key metric for how Google ranked pages in its search results.

Despite such rich beginnings, PageRank is now considered by many SEOs to be a less meaningful metric that too many people focus on for all the wrong reasons. As Google has shaped and refined its algorithm over the years to include hundreds of different factors, PageRank just isn’t as important as it used to be, but it still has some interesting value to SEO.

As you may know, the formula for calculating a PageRank is based on linking. Essentially, every page in Google’s index receives a PageRank, based on the number of websites linking to it and the relative quality of these links. Scores come in a logarithmic scale from 0-10, with 10 being the highest and most elusive PageRank (not even google.com ranks at 10).

When Google assigns a PageRank to a site, it’s assigning a level of importance. Pages that look important get crawled and re-indexed more frequently than others. Getting your content crawled at a higher rate means that it can be ranked by search engines more quickly — which can give you a leg up on the competition.

PageRank is also a good indicator if your site is having a problem. If your site is being exploited by hackers or if you are engaging in unscrupulous SEO, Google is likely to warn you by dropping your PageRank before dropping your ranking in searches.

Although PageRank is not the be all end all of SEO anymore, it is still a useful indicator for certain aspects of your site.

Picture the Art and Science of SEO

by Mike Siers

I love it when art and science come together. Maybe that is why I am so enthusiastic about SEO and the possibilities of the internet in general. Case in point, the other day I found the periodic table of SEO, courtesy of Search Engine Land. What this little piece of scientific art is showing is a formula for SEO success, based on ranking factors that search engines look for when crawling your website.

The table highlights fundamental ranking factors for on-site and off-site optimization strategies. Likewise, the document sheds light into search engine violations and any blocking by users, via Google’s newly released hiding feature.

The table offers a numerical breakdown of the factors in the upper right-hand corner of each element — a spinoff of the traditional Periodic Table. The numbers (1-3) are meant to indicate the level of importance of each element with “1” being least important and “3” representing the highest.

Some of the listed elements are as follows:

On-Page SEO Ranking Factors:

–  Content Quality and Research — are your pages well written and has keyword research been done?
–  HTML Tiles, Description, and Keywords (Meta Data) — does your meta data contain the keywords and do they describe the page?

Off-Page SEO Ranking Factors:

–  Link Quality — are your links from trusted and reputable websites?
–  Trust/Authority — do your links and shares make your site trustworthy?

Violations:

–  Thin Content — is you content more generic and lacking substance?
–  Keyword Stuffing — are you excessively stuffing keywords in your content?

This document is both extremely informative and creative. The challenge is following it and optimizing your website to the letter. That, like the SEO document, is both an art and a science.