Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

It’s been a long time since I have addressed Google’s Page Rank.  It almost seems as if it has fallen off the face of the Internet.  It defiantly is not as important as it used to be but there are still some factors to using a pages PageRank to help build link popularity to your site. 

In the days of old everyone was concerned with a pages rank.  We are seeing a shift away from this and concentrating on other things like Social Media Marketing. 

Today PageRanks most important element is the effect it has on a pages in-coming links.  The PR of the page itself does not have as much influence as it used to for helping in ranking for specific keyphrases.  However, the PR of an in-coming (keyphrase-relevant) link does help with ranking for that specific
keyphrase. 

So what does this really mean for you? It means that you should look at the sites you are trying to get to link to you.  Look only for those Web sites that are industry related and have a PageRank of 4 or higher.  Those are the pages that are going to benefit you the most in building your link popularity.

As far as internal links goes the PR of your internal pages help with internal linking and, therefore, the way you pass and distribute Google PR throughout your site via absolute vs. relative URLs does make a small difference on ranking. 

So you should still be concerned a little bit about your internal linking by always choosing absolute linking vs. relative linking for your internal pages and always look for those sites that link to you that have a PR of 4 or higher.

Would you like to learn more SEO techniques to apply to your Web site?  Sign up for one of our 3 Day SEO Workshops today and take your Web site to the next level!

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I watched a short video the other day with Jeffery Graham interviewing Matt Cutts from Google.  They were talking about some basic things you can do to help Google index and find your pages faster.  They are common things but we often get so tied up with trying to figure out the hard stuff we forget to check and make sure our pages have some of the basic SEO techniques applied to them first. 

#1 - Are you giving people what they are looking for?  Have we really sat back and thought about what people will be typing in when they are coming to our site.  Have we done any keyword research to back up our choice of keywords and keyword phrases?  I know for a fact that many of my students will come to one of our seo workshops and say they want to come up in the SERP’s for a particular keyword phrase but when I look at their site they have not even included that word on the site.

This is the most basic tip.  Include the words you want to come up for in your text starting with your title tag and description tags.  Your title tag is the first impression someone gets of your site and if the words they are looking for is include in the title and snippet of information ( the description tag) they first see in the SERP’s it will defiantly give you a better chance of them clicking on your site.  Give your users exactly what they are looking for and you will be automatically building trust and confidence in your site from the get go. 

#2 - Incoming links and more incoming links - Most of my students struggle with this fact but Matt Cutts made it real simple.  He suggested that if you are struggling with getting industry related links pointing back to your site start a blog!

Blogs are great way to participate in the on-line community while adding good rich content to your site.  If your start posting about things that interest you about your products or services or even you industry other people will find it interesting as well.  Blogs work like a big viral marketing plan.  One blog post can be linked to another which can be picked up by another blogger and the virus goes on and on.  Linking will come natural without you having to try very hard if you start blogging about what you know….your industry!  Blogs also help add pages to your site and helps in adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis.  We know that Google loves fresh content so this is a no brainer.

#3 - Matt stated that one misconception to Google’s indexing policy was that it takes months for a new site to get indexed on Google.  He said that this is highly unlikely and that it usually only takes them less than a month.  They refresh their data base about once a month now and if you take advantage of your Google Webmaster tools and submit a Google XML sitemap it may take even less some days within days.

Again these are just a few basic SEO tips that you can apply to your Website today.  If you would like to receive tips like this on a daily basis please feel free to signup for our SEO Tips of the Day. 

http://www.searchengineacademysc.com/seo-tip.htm

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A couple weeks ago I posted a Blog on Google Speaking out on Duplicate Content Issues, I am back today to address that topic once again.  There a few things that I can make clearer for you to help you keep the duplicate content penalty from getting you.When checking your site make sure you look for these items these are things that set off a red flag for duplicate content:

• canonical issues (www and non-www version);
  Search engines may think www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com are two different sites. You should set up a permanent redirect (technically called a “301 redirect”) between these sites. Once you do that, you will get full search engine credit for your work on these sites. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website. Check Link Split at: http://www.marketleap.com/
  
• pagination when different pages have identical titles and meta description;
  Each page of your site should have a unique set of Title, Description and Meta tags that clearly represents the content on that page.
  

• various versions of the home page (e.g. www.site.com and www.site.com/index.php);
  This is an easy one to over look.  All your home links should point back to a absolute link such as http://www.yoursite.com vs. http://www.yoursite.com/index.html

There is a free tool I found that will help you identifying if your site has duplicate content.  It will check the following:

• www and non-www header response;
• Google cache check;
• Similarity check;
• Default page check;
• 404 header response;
• PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).

Check it out: http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content.php 

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