Okay, you’ll very often hear me stating that I don’t put a lot of focus on PageRank. And seriously, I don’t. There have been times when it’s been more than a year since PR had been updated, although it appears as though Google’s gone back to quarterly or semi-annual PR updates.

Quickly, I’ll get into some details about GPR and at the bottom of this post will be a tool you can use to check your own “Future Google PageRank” (provided by DevShed and SEO Chat).

What is Google PageRank?

To keep it short and sweet, PR is at it’s most basic, a rating scale of 0-10 provided by Google as to what they think of the site/page. It’s loosely based on link popularity, but also takes into account the quality of the links, as opposed to just sheer volume. Very few sites in the world have a PR of 10 (last I checked, there were less than 30 total URLs with a PR 10, and most belong to Apple, Adobe, and of course, Google), and it might as well be considered impossible for your average business to obtain that ranking from the big “G”.

Here’s what Google says about it:

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

So while yes, PR can be a good indicator as to whether or not you should obtain a link from another site, flat out, relevance matters much more.

With a higher PageRank, will my site rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)?

Nope. Your PR has nothing to do with your keywords, your URL (gone are the days of www.keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com having any value whatsoever), or the relation of your keywords to the searches for them. PageRank simply tells you how “popular” a site is for the niche it appears to be in.

Google uses top-secret algorithms to rank pages in the search results. No one can really be sure how much, if any, weight PageRank holds, but it’s highly likely that it’s miniscule.

All that said, it’s still exciting to see your PR jump, and it does let you know if your linking efforts are working for you. If you ever find your site with a PR of N/A - it’s high time you check to see if Google’s even listing your site at all, and if you find a site that’s got a “grey bar” - run fast and far from any kind of linking arrangements with them.

Here’s where you can go to get the Google Toolbar for your browser, so you can check your own (or any other site’s) PageRank:

| For IE

And now - check your site’s “Future Google PageRank” here!

Future PageRank Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL

Popularity: 50% [?]

This post has just lost all relevance, when you read this: 5 EASY ways to tick off another SEO. The post has hence been removed, but please do read the other and let us know your thoughts there.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Does your site have a search function?

How do your visitors quickly figure out if you have what they want?

All the marketing in the world means squat if you don’t live up to the hype when visitors click your link. You’d be surprised at how much something so “trivial” like a search feature can mean to your site’s visitors. (And to your pockets!)

Google offers a search function via their adsense program. If you use Google ads as a form of revenue, you can easily add a search box that crawls the web AND your website, and produces the results on a page that you customize to match your website’s color scheme and logo. You can customize the search form itself to match your site, and you can add up to three URLs to the search, where your visitors can choose either the “web”, “site A”, “site B”, or “site C” to do their searching. When a visitor clicks on a link after using the “web” search, you will receive adsense revenue in your account. (No revenue is received when a visitor searches your site, however the default setting on the search box is set to search the web and it’s paid link results.)

If you’re not interested in Google or ad revenue, there are many other free search forms available. Freefind and Atomz are just two of them.

Where do I put my search box?

Your best bet is probably either in the top right or top center of your site, in a prominent location, and on ALL pages of your site. Visitors may enter your site from any one of your pages, and if they don’t find immediately what they’re looking for, they will be looking for either a search function or a way out (which means leaving your site within about 10 seconds… you don’t want that!)

Also, make sure it’s a text box, where users can type in what they’re looking for and then hit a button that does the search. Don’t make them click on another page to get to their search box, and then yet another to get their results, and limit the results to no more than 30 or 40 per page… slow loading results pages are a no-no.

To get targeted results…

Make sure your pages are optimized well for their content. If you title your pages “Page 1, Page 2″ - the search box won’t produce the best results for your site. If you title a page “Buy Widgets” - make sure the page is about buying widgets, so when the user enters “buy widgets” into the search box, your page will show up properly.

Use a clean, easy-to-follow navigational structure, and have a sitemap somewhere on your site using the descriptive page titles and descriptions.

Provide loads of relevant content, using keywords (but not OVERusing them), and you should find that your site visitors spend more time on your site than they did before… part in thanks to your handy-dandy search feature.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I encourage all of my clients to write articles about their field. “Post them on your site and let people use them if they link back to you.” I often find myself getting either dead silence, or an instant argument.

“I’m not going to just GIVE away information! That’s what they need to PAY ME FOR!” is a typical response. Often followed by, “And you want me to let people USE this information on their OWN sites as well!? You’re CRAZY!”

Crazy? Maybe. Stupid? No way.

Why you need to give away free information…

Think of it this way: Let’s say that you sell rubber bands of all shapes and sizes. Now, you happen to think that rubber bands are the coolest thing on the planet, and what they can do for people is just amazing. You’ve gone through the steps of getting a domain name, buying the hosting, having a site built and marketed for you, and you think to yourself, “Okay, now the money’s gonna roll right in here!” Right? Maybe.

But let’s say it does. And in your first 3 months of operating your site, you’ve sold a thousand orders for rubber bands. GREAT! Your profit’s hit an all time high, and you’re rolling in it. But you’ve also noticed something else, an increase in “support issue” phone calls and emails. You’re debating on hiring someone JUST to handle your buyers’ questions on why their technique isn’t working, or how to make it work better. Amidst these phone calls are questions like “Can it do _____?” and “How do I make it _____?”

So, you’ve written up a canned response email for questions like this, and you’re still flooded. You’ve got 3 people on a “creative team” developing new ways to use your rubber bands, and they’re furiously writing up MORE canned responses “just in case” the questions come up.

Sales are still skyrocketing, as are the questions. You never imagined the general public would try to use your rubber bands for so many purposes! They have the ideas, but they need your help in making them work.

So why not take their ideas and create a database in the form of articles to show everyone how to use rubber bands? You could write an article on using the really large bands for exercises. You could write another about how a rubber band ball is a great toy for kids, but also holds all your rubber bands in one place for easy retrieval when needed. How about an article on making a musical instrument for a child by using rubber bands of different lengths and thicknesses - like a guitar of sorts? See where I’m going with this?

Articles can give your customers ideas…

What if someone buys a package of your rubber bands, with the sole intention of just using them to bundle things together? They discover they have far too many rubber bands, and want to know what else they could do with them, so they go to the web site of the supplier (that’s you) to scan for “other uses”. Without your articles, they’re left in the dark, and probably regretting that they spent so much money on something they can’t find another use for. They’ll never buy rubber bands again, especially not from you.

But if you show them what can be done with bands that are a different size than the ones they bought, and they think it’s a great idea, guess what!? They’ll probably buy THOSE from you too!

5 Reasons for giving it away…

1. You help your customers and website visitors to know more about your product or service without them having to call or email you.

2. Other web sites that find your information useful will post your articles (with credit to you). This will raise your credibility and get you more traffic.

3. More content to optimize for the search engines and your readers. Include links to other relevant parts of your site (do NOT go overboard here) and you’ve tipped off the search engine spiders to other info, as well as guided your site visitors to related information.

4. More content on your site = one more thing for the search engines to look at when ranking your site. Fresh, updated sites rank much better than stale and unchanging ones.

5. Increased link popularity, which is another thing the search engines like to see.

As you can see, if it’d be good for a rubberband selling company, it’d be good for you. Regardless of whether or not you’re selling a tangible product or a service, explaining that product or service in ways that can benefit the majority is bound to produce great results for you, in many ways.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Okay, so the bane of every blogger’s existence is spam. Spam comments for drug, casino, and less-than-tasteful sites. How does one keep up with it all?

Enter Spam Karma (current version: 2.2) - the savior to all WordPress bloggers!

I use SK on all my sites where comments and pings are enabled. And I have yet to see a single spam comment get through. Dr. Dave keeps up with all the latest spammer techniques and is consistently releasing easy to upgrade updates to what is, in my opinion, the best overall spam blocker out there.

SK does a great job of manning the stations while allowing your site’s innocent commenters to proceed without hesitation - about 99.9% of the time. It depends on the rules you set in the Options, of course, but for the most part, your site visitors won’t even know what’s going on. But boy, will those bots know! (Okay, so they won’t, because they’re bots (ro-bots, automatically scripted to do you harm) but when their site doesn’t receive any hits from yours, well… heh eh eh!)

There are lots of anti-spam resources out there, and I’ll no doubt discuss them. But the bottom line is that I won’t ever install WordPress without installing Spam Karma as well. It’s just that dang good!

Popularity: 7% [?]