PageRank Explained (What is PR?)

–

If you get caught between a geeked out crossfire of tech words, or a blogger gathering of epic proportions, then you may have heard the geekish holy grail known as a high “PageRank.” Being a new web citizen or new blogger, you’ve probably heard this term get thrown out by your internet consultant who continually brags about how his PageRank 5 (PR5) site had gotten a link from some other famous PR7 site… This of course, means as much to you as the meows your cat gives you as he stares at you from his little kitty corner known as your sink.

So to break down the importance and meaning of a “Google PageRank” let’s start off by imagining you have a website that sells cellphones. Now, as you may or may not know, there are a hundred thousand kazillion other sites that sells cellphones online. Which is where our problem arises. Either way, YOU set up an online cellphone store which we will now call “CellPhone Store X“

Now imagine that I’m a consumer, willing and ready to buy a cellphone online. Problem is, I have no clue where to go online to buy a cellphone. So I do what any other average consumer does, I search for it, and as most people do, I would probably use Google as my search engine. Now I type in something like “buy cellphone online” and I will probably get millions (27,300,000 to be exact) of web pages back from good ol’ Google.

Question is, where does YOUR “CellPhone Store X” fall in with the other 27,300,000 sites? Well probably somewhere between 12,563,905 and who-gives-a- f$#%*.

Since you didn’t really do much Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then your webpage just comes out somewhere lost in the kazillions of other pages. On the other hand, those people who did optimize their websites most likely are on the top of this Google search query. Meaning they are the first sites listed after you search for the words “buycellphone online.”

How much more money do you think these people at the top of the search page is making than your site lost in the millions? Well, A LOT MORE.

Thus lies the importance of Google’s PageRank. It is a page ranking system that rates how important your page is. A web page can be ranked from 1 -10 with 10 being the highest. The higher your rank = a higher position when people search for terms related to your content.

CNN.com is an example of a very important site that Google ranked with a 1o. My sites, VinceGolangco.com and WhenInManila.com each have a PageRank of 3. Which is decently good.

To check your PageRank, you can check out this PageRank checker site.

Most people will never see a pagerank of 1. In fact, just getting to a PageRank of 1 is pretty impressive since it already entails lots of work and time invested.

How do you get your ranking higher include multiple facets but most importantly are LINKS and KEYWORDS.

Google ranks pages higher if lots of other pages LINK to it. Obviously, a site like CNN.com has countless other sites referencing and linking to it. While KEYWORDS are the number of times the searched terms are mentioned within your site. Be careful with this though as there is an overkill where using the words too much actually hurts your PageRank score.

Anyway, that’s pretty much the importance of PageRank in a nutshell. Will get more into details of how to raise your PageRank in future articles.

–