What is PageRank and how it works?
Posted on: June 13, 2015
If you are seeking to start your own website, one thing that is for sure is that you can’t make any progress if you are clueless on SEO (also known as Search Engine Optimization) and Google PageRank. Before you hang me out to dry, allow me to explain. Simply put, the ranking of your website is very much dependent on how well you understand SEO elements (on page SEO and off page SEO) and how effectively you market it to the world. Having said that, an understanding of how your web pages rank or how to make them rank higher is something you cannot ignore for your online marketing strategy .
What is PageRank?
Simply put, PageRank is a way that Google uses to determine how relevant or important a particular web page is. It’s basically an algorithm employed by Google to determine the ranking of a particular page and has in the recent past become a very important ranking factor in search engines.
What is the history of PageRank?
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the two individuals credited with the development of PageRank. These two brilliant minds are credited with changing how web pages are ranked today. Before PageRank was developed, keyword density was used by search engines to determine the importance of a page or how highly it was ranked. The downside to this is that many website owners simply loaded their pages with keyword phrases hence attracting high amounts of traffic.
What exactly does PageRank measure?
As already mentioned earlier, PageRank serves to measure the relevance or rather importance of a web page. The developers of this algorithm figured out that the most relevant pages are the ones that were heavily linked or contained useful information to many people. Pages with the highest number of links directed to them were looked upon as a vote of confidence from the many readers who frequented them. To put it bluntly, PageRank looks at links as votes.
Therefore, the more a page links to your page, the more relevant your page becomes and the more votes it gets. However, there is a caveat. With the latest Google updates, unnatural links can cause your site to be penalized. Proper emphasis should be put on having natural links from authority pages or sites linking to your page. Since PageRank views links as votes, pages from authority sites linking to your page have more weight than pages from ordinary sites. While linking is important in increasing a pages rank, proper care should be taken to ensure that the links are natural and do not attract any kind of penalty from Google.
What is the best way to increase PageRank?
If you’ve consumed the above useful information, you are probably wondering of how you can increase your page rank and subsequently, visibility. While you can resort to trading of relevant back links, care should be taken to ensure that you don’t trade with harmful links that may harm the rank of your page or ultimately your website. The best way to achieve a higher PageRank is by creating unique, informative and original content. This is content that other people would want to share or link to. The content you come up with should be able to supply a demand, be relevant, original and informative in every aspect!
