Page Rank Myths and Monsters

The Google Page Ranking system does not discriminate between novice and professional level websites. Nor does it award Page Rank where editorial decisions are concerned. Case in point: I've seen well conceived content pages with 10 to 20 out bound links fare no better in Page Rank than a web site with long lists of mismatched links. Both had Page Ranks of 4 even though there was a remarkable disparity in quality and content. Page Rank is a worthless.

True Value of a Web Page

When a large corporation purchases web-based ad space or banner ads, do you think they use the cute little colored Page Rank bar as a measurement? Emphatically no.

Media buyers look at a web sites log statistics for viewers and unique viewers per hour, day, month and year. Its the same principle when companies do media buys for broadcast, radio and print. Its all about how many readers or how many viewers are attracted. Advertisers set their rates by the analysis of this web traffic to include stats for gender, demographics, click through rates, pages visited, length of visit and much more.

So how do you get quality visitor traffic and good search engine ranking?

Keeping It Really Simple

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com like black text on a white background. So what are you going to do with all your Java Script effects, Flash, fancy graphics and great photography?

Balance your creativity and technology. Use CSS and good design while weaving in a fair share of text content into your pages.

Attracting Visitor Traffic

Many marketing websites promise they can get you tons of traffic or business inquiries by submitting your site to thousands of search engines. Other companies send out an email blast campaign to over a million plus emails. The problem with this method is that a surge in traffic to your website will be little more than a blip on Googles radar. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com awards higher page position to a website with consistent visitor traffic.

If you are a mega-site like hotels.com with a gargantuan television advertising budget then you have the advantage of pummeling TV viewers with your web site name and commercials.

But what about the rest of us?

Doing Battle with Goliath

Whether you are a corner neighborhood ice cream shop or an online gourmet ice cream vendor, both have the same challenge of getting and keeping traffic. Plain and simple, you have to give people a reason to visit and to keep coming back. A website can accomplish this by using some of the following techniques:

* Offer something for free, maybe a download of some sort. If you are an online store, considering offering a free/discount coupon. If you are a logo design site you could give away a Photo Shop template or clip-art. A surf shop could offer cool screen savers and so on. If you are a loan company or realtor, perhaps you could offer a free document about, how to increase your credit score.

* Visit Blogs and Forums related to your business. Share your ideas and talk up your website. Develop a reputation for being knowledgeable and helpful, and you will be regarded as an expert in your field.

* Place a link to your website on all of your outgoing e-mails. It sounds simple enough, yet very few people do it.

* Write articles about your craft or your business. There are hundreds of article directories where you can post your articles for free.

* Visit web directories and list your web site in all appropriate section.

* Set up an email list and send out weekly or monthly newsletters. Include links back to your website to entice readers to click and visit. This equates to increased traffic.

What about Link Trades?

99% of the websites that trade and post links have pages and pages of links that are completely useless to a website visitor.

SEO professionals, web site designers and marketers have extensively written and Blogged about how to achieve a high Google PageRank and 1st page position for targeted terms across major search engines.

Some think in-bound linking and out-bound linking with relevant high Page Rank sites is a key component to Googles secret sauce. Others believe that smart linking combined with keyword density and keyword page positioning earns you the magic ticket to the Google factory.

I would like to believe that the engineers at Google and the other search engines giants are not devoid of gray-matter. Google has hired and is still recruiting an army of PhD candidate programmers, developers, scientists and mathematicians. So sooner or later all the thousands of hours spent on creating useless link pages will go the way of the keyword meta-tag.

They will become useless and unnecessary.

Where Search Engines are Going

It can be said that, if you have nothing to say, then no one will listen. Computer scientists are working towards building a semantic search engine, a search engine that will closely emulate, answer and analyze your search queries like a human librarian.

For example, imagine a user is looking for documents that mention an organization with center in its name, but is not sure of the full or precise name of the organization. A keyword search on center would likely produce way too many documents because center is a common and ambiguous term. Our semantic search engine supports a query language called XML Fragments. This query language is designed to exploit UIMA | IBM Research's CAS annotations entered in the search engines index.

Its all about building a community. A web community connected by relevant links and great content which hopefully will garner you tons of traffic.

Black text on white pages!