The word on every blogger's lips is PageRank, or PR for short. If you're new to blogging and your blog is your first website, you might not understand what PR is, or what exactly it means, or indeed why is Google Page Rank important.
In a nutshell, your page rank will help determine how high or low you fall in Google's search results. A very big, successful website will have a high PR which means that when someone does a search on Google, chances are that big, high-pagerank website will be near the top. So why is Google pagerank important? Page Rank is important because the higher your PR, the more search engine traffic you will be getting!
A note: Google PageRank is not the same as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They both influence where a site will turn up in search results, but they are independent of each other. A search engine optimized page may not have a high pagerank, nor will a high-pagerank website necessarily be written for SEO.
Your website's Google page rank is sort of like your reputation with Google. Google knows that some sites are better than others, and this influences their results. While the exact algorithms for determining PR are top-secret, here are some of the things that go in to calculating Google PageRank:
Links. Backlinks are the most important factor for determining Google pagerank. Google assumes that if many people are talking about a page, if the page is linked to by many other websites, then it's a quality page. Think about popular sites that get spread around by sites like Digg and Reddit. Lots of people are talking about those sites, so they have a ton of backlinks. More backlinks = more PR.
The best way to get backlinks is, of course, to have quality content that gets noticed. If your page gets Dugg, or Stumbled, or Redded...it? (;), lots of people will see it and hopefully some of them will link to you on their own site. The amount of PR boost you get from a backlink depends on the PR of the site that's linking to you. So if you get a backlink from a huge site like Digg (PR8), it counts more than a link on someone's PR1 blog.
Other ways to get backlinks include commenting on blogs, participating in forums (linking your site in a post, or in your signature), and other techniques that range from kinda sneaky to downright unethical, which I won't discuss here.
Backlinks are the major influence on the calculation of Google PageRank. However, a few other things are taken into account:
Outbound Links. Links on your own site can affect your own PageRank: Namely, they can negatively impact it. If you have too many links on your page (to the tune of over 100), this will give you a penalty. Also, if you link to websites that Google has marked as shady, you may get a penalty for that as well.
Bounce Rate. Rumor has it that Google PageRank (or at least their general search engine ranking) is affected by a site's bounce rate. Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave the first page of a website without visiting any other pages. Bounce Rate is very high for blogs, and lower for other sites where more information is held on other pages. A low bounce rate (say, 40% or lower) reflects a quality site.
Age. Older sites have higher PR. Whether the age of a site is a factor in calculating PageRank, or whether it's just a reflection of more time to build pages and collect backlinks, I don't know, but if you have the choice between two domains, one which was just registered and one which is 5 years old, go with the older one for a PR boost.
Page Rank is a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Only the most esteemed sites get PR10, such as Apple's official site, Google Labs, and Nasa.gov.
There are a number of sites that will calculate or estimate your pagerank for you, as well as toolbars you can download. Google releases updated PR info every few months, but in reality a page's Google PageRank is always changing. So, the Google PageRank that you see might be 3 months out of date. Keep this in mind when comparing your site's PageRank with other sites.
~Joy
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Google PageRank: What is it, how is it calculated, why is it important?
July 26, 2009 blogging, search engines, SEO, website traffic, websites
You need Google Analytics for your website!
July 11, 2009 blogging, search engines, SEO, website traffic, websites
--Or something like Google Analytics, anyway.
Google Analytics is a free, easy-to-use method of gathering statistics on your website. You put a small piece of code into your website, and Google will start collecting data on your visitors. You will receive information on how many people are visiting, how long they are staying, what browser they are using, what search keywords or what websites they are coming from to get to your site, and much more.
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, and the best thing about it is that it's totally free. I could expect to pay a high monthly fee for such a service. I have Google Analytics code installed on all four of my websites, and I'm very happy with it.
Google Analytics has a bit of a learning curve, because it's so powerful, but there are many things you can learn from the Google Analytics data. To start out simple, let's see what search engine keywords are bringing people to your website. After you have installed the code, wait a few days for Google Analytics to gather data.
Once Google Analytics has collected some visitor data for your site, scroll down to the Traffic Sources pie chart. If you have a red wedge in your chart, that's your search engine traffic. Click 'view report' and view the full keyword report.
It's very important that you know what search keywords are driving people to your website or blog. When you find out what keywords are working, you can work on making sure those keywords are used more often.
Sometimes, you will get search engine traffic from a search term that is not addressed on your site. For instance, on my knitting blog one person searched for "how to dye roving". I don't have a how-to article about dyeing roving on my blog, but it sure would be a good idea to write one! Make sure that when your readers are searching for something, they will get what they want to find. Google Analytics will help you identify what people are searching for when they come to your page.
That's just one of the ways you can use the power of Google Analytics to improve your website or blog. There are other ways too, so poke around on Google Analytics and learn something about your visitors.
~Joy
Google Analytics is a free, easy-to-use method of gathering statistics on your website. You put a small piece of code into your website, and Google will start collecting data on your visitors. You will receive information on how many people are visiting, how long they are staying, what browser they are using, what search keywords or what websites they are coming from to get to your site, and much more.
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, and the best thing about it is that it's totally free. I could expect to pay a high monthly fee for such a service. I have Google Analytics code installed on all four of my websites, and I'm very happy with it.
Google Analytics has a bit of a learning curve, because it's so powerful, but there are many things you can learn from the Google Analytics data. To start out simple, let's see what search engine keywords are bringing people to your website. After you have installed the code, wait a few days for Google Analytics to gather data.
Once Google Analytics has collected some visitor data for your site, scroll down to the Traffic Sources pie chart. If you have a red wedge in your chart, that's your search engine traffic. Click 'view report' and view the full keyword report.
It's very important that you know what search keywords are driving people to your website or blog. When you find out what keywords are working, you can work on making sure those keywords are used more often.
Sometimes, you will get search engine traffic from a search term that is not addressed on your site. For instance, on my knitting blog one person searched for "how to dye roving". I don't have a how-to article about dyeing roving on my blog, but it sure would be a good idea to write one! Make sure that when your readers are searching for something, they will get what they want to find. Google Analytics will help you identify what people are searching for when they come to your page.
That's just one of the ways you can use the power of Google Analytics to improve your website or blog. There are other ways too, so poke around on Google Analytics and learn something about your visitors.
~Joy
How soon will your blog get search engine traffic?
July 9, 2009 blogging, search engines, SEO, website traffic
Websites can get a large portion of their traffic from search engines, so it's always a waiting game wondering how soon a new site will start appearing in search results. You can submit your site to the search engines, give them site maps, and ping them, but how soon will people be able to search for you?
On July 7, my book review blog This Girl's Bookshelf got its first search engine hit. The search was for Bookmooch, which I had written an article about on July 6. The blog itself is a little less than a month old.
I'm very new at trying to write search engine optimized articles, but it's encouraging that my brand new article on my brand new blog is coming up in the Google results. This Girl's Bookshelf almost certainly has a pagerank of 0 at this point, but it is showing up in Google Search.
My websites are not very strong in search engines yet. My oldest and largest blog, Joyarna Knitblog, has a PageRank of 2 but search engine traffic only accounts for about 2% of my total traffic. Most of the terms that I get search traffic from on that blog are very specific knitting phrases. I do not try to write SEO-optimized articles on my knitting blog. Instead, I just write how I would normally write.
I discovered that I got my first search engine hit by using Google Analytics, which is a powerful and important tool for anyone running a website.
I was very happy that I didn't have to wait long for my first search engine hit on my blog. Older sites do tend to do better on Google, but new sites can indeed show up in results.
~Joy
On July 7, my book review blog This Girl's Bookshelf got its first search engine hit. The search was for Bookmooch, which I had written an article about on July 6. The blog itself is a little less than a month old.
I'm very new at trying to write search engine optimized articles, but it's encouraging that my brand new article on my brand new blog is coming up in the Google results. This Girl's Bookshelf almost certainly has a pagerank of 0 at this point, but it is showing up in Google Search.
My websites are not very strong in search engines yet. My oldest and largest blog, Joyarna Knitblog, has a PageRank of 2 but search engine traffic only accounts for about 2% of my total traffic. Most of the terms that I get search traffic from on that blog are very specific knitting phrases. I do not try to write SEO-optimized articles on my knitting blog. Instead, I just write how I would normally write.
I discovered that I got my first search engine hit by using Google Analytics, which is a powerful and important tool for anyone running a website.
I was very happy that I didn't have to wait long for my first search engine hit on my blog. Older sites do tend to do better on Google, but new sites can indeed show up in results.
~Joy
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