A.P. Lawrence

Google Page rank search engine Optimization

Fri Jul 11 17:11:09 GMT 2003 Google Page rank search engine Optimization

I've had several discussions about Google Page Rank recently. This http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/ discusses it fully, and is worth reading even though the math will give you a headache. One very important quote though:

Mega-sites, like http://news.bbc.co.uk have tens or hundreds of editors writing new content - i.e. new pages - all day long! Each one of those pages has rich, worthwile content of its own and a link back to its parent or the home page! That's why the Home page Toolbar PR of these sites is 9/10 and the rest of us just get pushed lower and lower by comparison..

• Principle: Content Is King! There really is no substitute for lots of good content!

Which has long been my mantra.

And this:

PageRank is also only part of the story about what results get displayed high up in a Google listing. For example there's some evidence to suggest that Google is paying a lot of attention these days to the text in a link's anchor when deciding the relevance of a target page - perhaps more so than the page's PR..

If you want popularity, you need content. All the tricks and search engine submissions in the world won't help you without content. Content makes you interesting to Google and other search engines, and to other web sites, who will link to you, which makes you even more popular with Google, and so on. See Web site promotion and popularity for more on this.

You say you can't think of content for your site? For example, I recently talked with someone whose customer does apartment rentals to contract employees; in other words their specialty is is working with HR offices to find apartments for their temporary employees. Doesn't seem that there's much you can say beyond the obvious, right? Not so: there is a lot of related content you can add to these pages: anything related to Human Resources and the solicitation, maintenance, care and feeding of temporary employees is relevant to the HR people that you'd want to visit here if this were your site. Legal aspects, legislation, recruiting techniques, salary surveys, advice to contract employees: it just goes on and on. I bet there are at least several dozen pages that could be written instantly, and many dozen more would come with a little thought. And because HR and contract employee issues are constantly changing, you'd have reason to add new content constantly.

Another recent conversation was with an appliance retailer. What's to write about? Plenty: energy saving information, legislation and state programs that encourage conservation by buying new appliances, clothes washing techniques, food storage tips, reviews of up-scale appliances, suggestions for home theatre installations, kitchen remodeling advice, advice on hiring contractors, do it yourself tips - again, the related content just goes on on and on.

Whatever your business is, there is content that can be published. You can write it in house or buy it from content providers, the point is that the more you have, the more valuable your site is to search engines, which means it is more likely that people will find you.

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