Even more interesting is the fact that the words "Click
Here" are nowhere on the page. It would be silly to use "Click Here" as keywords
because it is not a normal search term, and Adobe did not even include them
anywhere on the page text, title, description, or in any metatags at all. So why
does Google rank Adobe's download page number one on that term?
The answer is external links. As a convenience to customers and site
visitors, just about every web site that has a PDF file available also has a
link to Adobe for the Acrobat download. And almost invariably, the link text is
something like, "If you need Acrobat Reader, click here."
The Adobe example
illustrates a key point about links: The search engines use anchor text as a
huge hint as to what the target web page is really about. Anchor text, for those
who need to know, is the visible link text that you click on in the browser when
the page is rendered.
In some ways that makes our lives more difficult
because we cannot control how others link to us, much less whether they link to
us. There are some ways around this that I'll touch cover in the next
installment. But first a word about Page Rank.
Page Rank values range from 0
to 10 (which is an eleven point scale, oddly enough). The actual components of
Google's Page Rank calculation are yet another closely guarded secret, but it
doesn't take a genius to see that the number of external links to your page is a
huge part of it.
The importance of Page Rank is sometimes overblown since search engines must
by definition care more about a page's relevance to search queries. However,
Page Rank is definitely one of the factors that will push your page higher in
the crowd of equally relevant pages returned as query results. If you have
virtually no competitors for your primary keywords, don't worry about Page Rank.
The rest of us need to have it on our radar.
There are precious few PR 10 web pages and at the time I'm writing this,
Adobe's Acrobat download page does indeed have that coveted PR 10 ranking. It
certainly got the bulk of its rank because so many sites provide unreciprocated
links to it. Another factor in Page Rank appears to be age: All things being
equal, sites that have been around longer tend to have higher Page Rank
values.
A hint to those still awake: The age factor as well as the Google sandbox
described in part 1 of this series are both powerful arguments for getting web
sites up and spidered as soon as possible, even if only as prototypes or
proof-of-concepts.
If you were to survey tens of thousands of web sites, I believe you'd find
that the most successful private, non-corporate web sites have a PR of 6. There
are very, very few PR 7 sites, and if you've managed to achieve a PR 4 or 5
without professional SEO help, you've done pretty well.
Now we come to the slightly depressing part: One of the best ways to improve
your page rank (and therefore improving the tendency to show up higher in search
results) is to get an unreciprocated link to your page from a page with a higher
page rank. If the Acrobat download page linked to my site, I'd be sitting
pretty.
But alas, such links are very difficult to come by. Even worse, the one thing
we can easily offer is a return link, but such reciprocal links have dubious
value. I have anecdotal evidence that their value is rapidly declining and they
are worth far less now than they were just one month ago when I wrote those
words.
Here's another tip: Reciprocal links to sites that have nothing to do with
your web site in terms of content are a total waste of time. If you have a site
about wedding gowns and you exchange links with a gambling site, in my opinion
you've achieved nothing.
For More Info :
http://www.the20seotools.com
http://www.seo.infozabout.com
In
fact, I predict that if Google finds many reciprocal links with unrelated sites
on your web page, you will actually be punished in terms of your page's
ranking.
The spider likes it when you link to things that provide value to
your visitors. And the spider gets angry when you trade worthless links solely
for the purpose of fooling it into thinking your site is wildly popular. I
predict spidey will bite you, if not today then tomorrow.
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