How’d you like to know exactly what PageRank is, how to improve it, and get much more organic traffic?
If you’re not an experienced webmaster, don’t worry, you’re in the right place! Because this is a super simple, practical guide for beginners like me
.
In this post, I’ll explain what PageRank is, why it’s so important to work on this aspect of optimization for search engines, and what strategies you can implement to improve it.
In PART 1 of “SEO for Beginners”, we focused on topics related to “ON page optimization“, i.e. everything you can do ON and FROM your site, so that when Google evaluates your site, they rank it in a good position.
In PART 2, we’re going to focus on working on the other part of SEO: OFF page optimization, especially with regard to PageRank, as we’ve indicated in the title.
It is a numerical figure that works on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the ideal score. It’s used to express the importance, relevance, reliability, and reputation of your site. These aspects are then consolidated, taking into account the number and quality of links pointing back to your site.
In addition to the volume of links, the PageRank algorithm also considers the origin, the quality, and the reputation of each of the sources that have mentioned you. There are dozens of other factors that influence the PR that we’ll be taking a look at later on in this post-
Keep reading, because later on I’ll show you various tactics for getting backlinks (external links) and improving PageRank.
Precisely because of this, it makes sense that aspects such as reputation, authority, and relevance are so important in the concept of PageRank.
To avoid getting frustrated or angry with Google, it’s vital to clarify the following: Reputation is not the same popularity. You can have a very popular site, but with very low PageRank. How?
Well, pay close attention to the following (the head of webspam at Google), to show the difference between popularity and authority/reputation:
In the table below, you can see, in order of importance, what the key factors are:
To compare and contrast the results of Moz, , who came to almost the same conclusions:
As you can see, the +1 on Google Plus, and everything related to links are in the top positions.
To clearly understand this info, we should focus on the following FOUR insights:
1- The number and quality of backlinks (external links pointing back to your site) remain extremely important for the ranking.
2- Social signals continue to become stronger as a factor for ranking
3- Quality and relevant content (context) remains a key factor, and important in building authority, reputation, and relevance.
4- The importance of the keyword in the URL or domain has lost relevance.
These studies confirm what s said, when he explained why building links and obtaining backlinks, remain the key to achieving greater visibility and organic traffic:
So, on top of working on creating amazing things for your brand, first, you should work on promoting a powerful campaign to distribute your content. You can use tools like that help increase your presence on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. That way, you can make sure your content reaches as far as possible.
When another page in your field, who has excellent reputation, relevance, and authority, puts a link pointing back to your website, they transfer part of their reputation to your site. However, this means they’ll have less “reputation juice” available for transfering their own links.
Check out how Link Juice, with good reputation, is normally transferred to other sites:
So, whether you have a page with high or low PageRank, you should hold on to what you’ve already got and manage your “juice reputation” carefully, to save enough for YOUR own links.
You must continue to work hard on the quality of your content and site, so you have more chances of other important websites to consider you useful and relevant and then name you on their sites. That’s how you can get more points, or stronger juice, that will definitely influence YOUR PageRank.
-Image credit: Woorank If you want to find out and control your PageRank, you can take a peek at these sites:
The Domain Authority uses over 40 factors to determine the score, but the main two are: the quantity-quality of backlinks that you get from other sites, and how much authority they themselves have.
The DA is the ideal indicator for comparing one site with another, or controlling the strength of your website over time. The DA uses a logarithmic scale of 100 points, ideally reaching 100. You can access and measure the DA of your site here:
By the way, if you manage to score a high DA, you’ll be very close to getting a high position on Google’s PageRank.
2.1- Produce high quality, relevant content, so that people find your site and content linkable.
2.2- Share your content on social networks, as they are another avenue for redistribution of your links, and also through this tactic you can earn likes, retweets, and +1s, which function as social signals that add points to your reputation and in turn, up your PageRank.
2.3- Participate actively in forums and communities to share information of quality and relevance. This is a great way to distribute your links, and to get your content or site to reach others.
2.4- Create, develop and enhance your relationships with influencers, bloggers, consultants, and editors. In every industry, you should already know that there are a number of reputable figures thay people listen to and trust. Take advantage to develop relationships with them, because they’ll be able to enhance distribution of your content, and include quality backlinks to your blog.
2.5- Submit a profile on Wikipedia and other directories, so that people can find you through different channels which also possess high reputation.
2.6- Guest Blogging: although this practice has been discredited due to the generation of poor quality articles, which have become spam (since they were used only to promote links), Google has failed to encourage this tactic. But, if you can ensure that you can create a high quality guest post, that’s relevant to the context of your area, then go ahead.
2.7- Promote images and videos through infographics, photos, presentations, webinars, came videos. YouTube adds a lot of weight and reputation.
2.8- Make quality contributions through comments on other articles or sites where you can mention your link.
If you’re not an experienced webmaster, don’t worry, you’re in the right place! Because this is a super simple, practical guide for beginners like me
.In this post, I’ll explain what PageRank is, why it’s so important to work on this aspect of optimization for search engines, and what strategies you can implement to improve it.
In PART 1 of “SEO for Beginners”, we focused on topics related to “ON page optimization“, i.e. everything you can do ON and FROM your site, so that when Google evaluates your site, they rank it in a good position.
In PART 2, we’re going to focus on working on the other part of SEO: OFF page optimization, especially with regard to PageRank, as we’ve indicated in the title.
1- What is off page optimization? What role does PageRank play in all this?
Off page optimization involves working on those external factors that directly impact: the reputation, authority, and relevancy of your site and content. These are the external factors that matter most to Google, when it comes time to assign a score and position your site on their search engine.1.1- What is PageRank and what role does it play in OFF page optimization?
PageRank (PR) is the #1 factor (of over 200 others) that Google uses to determine the ranking of sites on its search engine.It is a numerical figure that works on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the ideal score. It’s used to express the importance, relevance, reliability, and reputation of your site. These aspects are then consolidated, taking into account the number and quality of links pointing back to your site.
In addition to the volume of links, the PageRank algorithm also considers the origin, the quality, and the reputation of each of the sources that have mentioned you. There are dozens of other factors that influence the PR that we’ll be taking a look at later on in this post-
1.2-What is PageRank and why is it important ?
Basically, the idea is as follows:The better the PageRank, the more likely you are to appear at the top of search engine results, which means more visibility and more chances that people click on and enter your site. This means you get more organic traffic. The more people on your site, the more money you make.Recall that in addition to organic traffic, there are other types of traffic:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic through advertising (costs money).
- Referred traffic: when people enter your site through links that have been referred on other sites.
- Direct Traffic: when the user types the URL of your site directly into the address bar.
2- What is the key factor for getting a high PageRank?
The objective of optimizing and improving PageRank is to get as many quality external links that point to your website organically, i.e. not paid for, false, nor spam.Keep reading, because later on I’ll show you various tactics for getting backlinks (external links) and improving PageRank.
2.1- So, why is important to have lots of external links or backlinks?
Google thinks that if your site has been linked to several times, it’s because you’re doing something good. For them, it’s a sign that people like what you do, your content is useful, high-quality, relevant, and therefore you must have certain authority or be a quality reference in the area that you specialize in, and that’s why people are citing your site or content.Precisely because of this, it makes sense that aspects such as reputation, authority, and relevance are so important in the concept of PageRank.
To avoid getting frustrated or angry with Google, it’s vital to clarify the following: Reputation is not the same popularity. You can have a very popular site, but with very low PageRank. How?
Well, pay close attention to the following (the head of webspam at Google), to show the difference between popularity and authority/reputation:
“PageRank is not a measure of popularity of the sites. If you were to look at sites that were popular, well, for example porn sites are very popular. But people tend not to link to porn sites. On the other hand, if you take something like the Wisconsin Real Estate Board, probably not a ton of people go there, but quite a few people do link to government websites.
And so popularity in some sense is a measure of where people go, whereas PageRank is much more a measure of reputation, it’s much more a reputation of where people link. And there is a disparity there. Or else, you know, porn sites would have the highest PageRank, and goverment sites would be very very low in our ranking system.”
3- Factors that affect Google ranking.
Every two years, Moz, an authority in the field of SEO, through which, they try to understand the Google algorithm better. They try to determine the factors and characteristics of the pages with the best positions in search engine results.In the table below, you can see, in order of importance, what the key factors are:
To clearly understand this info, we should focus on the following FOUR insights:
1- The number and quality of backlinks (external links pointing back to your site) remain extremely important for the ranking.
2- Social signals continue to become stronger as a factor for ranking
3- Quality and relevant content (context) remains a key factor, and important in building authority, reputation, and relevance.
4- The importance of the keyword in the URL or domain has lost relevance.
These studies confirm what s said, when he explained why building links and obtaining backlinks, remain the key to achieving greater visibility and organic traffic:
“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”By the way, out of these 4 insights, social media tends to be the most powerful and where you yourself can work to improve your PageRank. Why? A good presence on social networks contributes to the positioning of your brand and works as an excellent distributor of content through likes, shares, tweets, retweets, +1s. On top of that, it serves as a way to reach influencers and other bloggers. If they find what you do relevant, they’ll definitely want to share the quality information you’ve provided among their audience, and end up giving you quality backlinks.
So, on top of working on creating amazing things for your brand, first, you should work on promoting a powerful campaign to distribute your content. You can use tools like that help increase your presence on Google+, Facebook and Twitter. That way, you can make sure your content reaches as far as possible.
4- The importance of your reputation and Link Juice.
As we were saying, each site should work to consolidate and achieve a high reputation, as this will directly impact PageRank. That means, this is something that must be cultivated and maintained.When another page in your field, who has excellent reputation, relevance, and authority, puts a link pointing back to your website, they transfer part of their reputation to your site. However, this means they’ll have less “reputation juice” available for transfering their own links.
Check out how Link Juice, with good reputation, is normally transferred to other sites:
You must continue to work hard on the quality of your content and site, so you have more chances of other important websites to consider you useful and relevant and then name you on their sites. That’s how you can get more points, or stronger juice, that will definitely influence YOUR PageRank.
-Image credit: Woorank If you want to find out and control your PageRank, you can take a peek at these sites:
5- Domain Authority: the other side of PageRank
Domain Authority is the algorithm developed by Moz, which as we mentioned before, is one of the most authoritative sites worldwide in the field of SEO. It predicts how a website will perform in search engine ranking in Google, based on their reputation.The Domain Authority uses over 40 factors to determine the score, but the main two are: the quantity-quality of backlinks that you get from other sites, and how much authority they themselves have.
The DA is the ideal indicator for comparing one site with another, or controlling the strength of your website over time. The DA uses a logarithmic scale of 100 points, ideally reaching 100. You can access and measure the DA of your site here:
By the way, if you manage to score a high DA, you’ll be very close to getting a high position on Google’s PageRank.
6- Tactics to improve your DA and PR
Since the two of them are quite similar, we propose a “unified solution” to improve both the PR, as much as the DA. The following list gives you practical advice that you can do yourself, even if you don’t have a webmaster.1- Clean up bad links:
Although, this is a task that’s usually done by webmasters, you can consider doing it yourself. Start by using Google to track other pages that mention you. If they have low or bad reputation, then you can ask them to remove your link from their sites.2- Get good backlinks:
How to do it:2.1- Produce high quality, relevant content, so that people find your site and content linkable.
2.2- Share your content on social networks, as they are another avenue for redistribution of your links, and also through this tactic you can earn likes, retweets, and +1s, which function as social signals that add points to your reputation and in turn, up your PageRank.
2.3- Participate actively in forums and communities to share information of quality and relevance. This is a great way to distribute your links, and to get your content or site to reach others.
2.4- Create, develop and enhance your relationships with influencers, bloggers, consultants, and editors. In every industry, you should already know that there are a number of reputable figures thay people listen to and trust. Take advantage to develop relationships with them, because they’ll be able to enhance distribution of your content, and include quality backlinks to your blog.
2.5- Submit a profile on Wikipedia and other directories, so that people can find you through different channels which also possess high reputation.
2.6- Guest Blogging: although this practice has been discredited due to the generation of poor quality articles, which have become spam (since they were used only to promote links), Google has failed to encourage this tactic. But, if you can ensure that you can create a high quality guest post, that’s relevant to the context of your area, then go ahead.
2.7- Promote images and videos through infographics, photos, presentations, webinars, came videos. YouTube adds a lot of weight and reputation.
2.8- Make quality contributions through comments on other articles or sites where you can mention your link.
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