Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Google Pagerank and SEM

One of most confusing things to learn about search engine marketing is that Google pagerank and how well a page ranks for a search term are not the same thing.

The fact is, having a high pagerank does not ensure your site will get a good listing in a Google search. You can see what I mean by doing a search at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/ and then having the results displayed by "Relevance" and then again by "Pagerank."

Why the different results? Because the pagerank of a page is primarily determined by the number of links and the pagerank of the links pointing to it. How well a page ranks in the search engine results is a more complicated algorithm because it includes "the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it)." Copied from Google Technology

Now if you're trying to get your web page a good placement for 1 or more search terms so you can get some free search engine traffic you need to add 1 more seo term to your vocabulary.

"Latent Semantic Indexing" - used by Google and other search engines to help determine the relevance of a site's content to the search term.

And rather than try to explain this complicated method of determining relevance here's a short video that will give you an idea of how it works.




Having good content, using good search terms (keywords), using relevant words and terms and Google pagerank are all important when you're doing sem.

To Your Success,
Susan

If you found this tip useful please let me know by leaving a comment.


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