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Fast Google Ranking and Common Sense

Posted on: 08-15-2010 Posted in: Articles, Business Development / Strategy, Search Marketing, Social Media Marketing

When it comes to search engine optimization and strategy, common sense is taking the lead on building an online presence. The common strategic theme is “digital influence” with the world’s largest search engine (google). Consider for a moment the incredible amount of visibility the search giant has now with search result interactivity. From a massive amount of registered google users using the search engine on a normal daily basis to an ever increasing amount of 3rd party integrated social applications sharing data, Google has the ability to validate true organic trends on nearly a real time basis.

Frederick Townes (Founder of  W3 Edge and CTO of Mashable) wrote a few years back about 50 ways to get your blog ranked in Google titled “Get Your Blog Google Ranked in 30 Days or Less” which surprisingly today is hardly speculation, these suggestions are now commonplace strategy for every aspiring web site owner.

The typical Missilefish consulting process regarding content strategy covers several of Frederick’s suggestions as mission critical steps in launching or developing a compelling website. Below is a cherry-picking of his well known list of 50 steps.

48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.

43. Don’t stuff blog post titles with keywords. It’s a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be ~40% keywords, ~60% non-keywords.

41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a “site hosting” or “site design” blog.

40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don’t forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year’s “next big thing” is this year’s hackneyed cliché.

37. Don’t use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.

28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site’s topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.

23. Participate in your link community. Forum and blog links are ephemeral, lasting a day or two as web fodder, so there’s always the need for more green. Interact by posting to not only drive traffic with the link, but to also pick up another link from a credible site. All good.

20. Cite the sources of your content. This adds credibility to your posts. It also provides a trail for a reader interested in learning more about the topic at hand.

16. Write about popular brands or celebrities where possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging short sales in the market or clothing for the over-sized human, celebrity and name brands get picked up by spiders.

13. Add imagery and video content to your posts. A picture is worth a thousand web words. Charts and graphs simplify complex information and don’t take up a lot of room. If you aren’t an artist, create a relationship with a freelancer. Never use clip art.

5. Cross link your posts. Link amongst your related blog posts using the keywords you’re optimizing your blog for as the anchor text.

2. Be consistent into month two. Keep the tone, style and topicality of your blog consistent for the first two months until spiders get it. Then, you can branch out to peripheral topics to expand reader interest.

Just these few chosen steps will make a huge difference in your growth rate online. On the daily… there are new strategies being developed, dozens of new technologies and “can’t live without” websites have been developed over the last couple years. The list is nearly endless when it comes to branching out online and developing blog traffic.

A little about PageRank™

PageRank is a number from 0 to 10. It is calculated using special algorithm which is not disclosed by Google, but from quick observation you can notice that PR is spread in some sort of Geometrical Progression.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

In the equation ‘t1 – tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. It’s the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is. It doesn’t matter though, as this equation is good enough.

One of the most interesting and important things about Page Rank is the way PR flows between websites and inside internal pages. This is highly speculated area since this is the most secretive algorithm heavily guarded by Search Engine Engineers, but there is some public information on how it works.

Based on the PageRank distribution, the value of the Initial Page (Linking Page) is based on (NOTE: page, not website since websites contain many pages).Fast Google Ranking and Common Sense

For example:
PR1 = 8 points
PR2 = 64 points
PR3 = 512 points
PR4 = 4096 points
PR5 = 32768 points
PR6 = 262144 points
PR7 = 2097152 points
PR8 = 16777216 points
PR9 = 134217728 points
PR10 = 1073741824 points
(Note that this type of calculation is nowhere near precise!).

It is theorized that each link, including internal links to the same website, are counted with nearly equal value, although recent findings confirm that links found on top half portion of the page are valued slightly more than the ones on the lower portion.

The main goal in link buying and main purpose of this link buying guide is to highlight the importance of Link Juice Calculation. Link Juice is basically the amount of “PR juice” your link will take from each linking page. It is really simple to calculate the number of links on a page and divide the total PR value of that page to that number in order to find the actual “Link Juice Value”. Using this simple formula you will be easily able to estimate which link deal is best for you since no page is equal to another.

In order to make your life even more complicated, Search Engines estimate the value of passed PageRank based on Topical Relevance. To learn more about Page Rank information I suggest you dig into the following blogs;

  • Google’s Pagerank explained on Webworkshop.net. (http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html)
  • Link buying guide on on Venetsian.  (http://venetsian.com/link-buying-guide/)
  • Google Pagerank Uncovered on Webmarketingnow.com (http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/google-pagerank-uncovered.html)

  • Anonymous

    It’s easy to underestimate the amount of attention to detail you need when starting a blog, or even more so, fixing one!

  • Anonymous

    This post is full of useful info. Speaking for budding bloggers and web content strategists everywhere, thank you! That is a great point you made about updating old posts – some best practices stay pretty constant (such as the ones you’ve highlight in this blog) where others seem to change fairly rapidly. I agree that it is important to update blog content you’ve pushed so that it remains relevant – I’m just curious as to how you think it is best to go about doing so.

    When updating old posts with new information, do you suggest creating a new blog that references the old one? Or actually updating the old post (calling out the updates)?

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  • http://twitter.com/themissilefish Chief Multiplier

    If the old post was popular (say a couple dozen or more comments) I would suggest creating a new page (in wordpress I would suggest you make it a page actually);

    * create a new page with updated and improved content
    * change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
    * publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
    * send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
    * wait for the links to come in, again;
    * rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
    o more control over the keyword density
    o even more links pointing at the article
    o the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking

    Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes.

    As for just simple updates, the ping management system in wordpress will handle notifying other sites (assuming you configured this correctly)

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  • http://www.megantime.com megantime

    Again, great information. Thank you for the quick response and I look forward to putting this into action on my blog.

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