SEO Mistake #6 – Obsessing Over PageRank
If you’re new to this search engine optimization business, you probably have no idea what PageRank is.
PageRank: This is Google’s link analysis algorithm that measures the importance, relevance and value of a web page based on the quality of the pages linking to it.
Basically, PageRank will tell you, on a scale of 0 to 10, how important your site is in the overall scheme of the Internet. It will not tell you how well your page will rank for the keyword phrases your customers are going to use to find your page.
What does this mean?
In a nutshell, this means that you’re wasting your time if you spend more than two minutes on your page’s meta tags or looking at your PageRank.
Meta tags are not going to ensure that your page ranks in the top 10 for your keyword phrases. And PageRank is not an accurate measure of where your page appears in the SERPs for your keyword phrases.
You’re better off spending your time writing quality content, developing relationships with the owners of high ranking sites in your industry or relevant industries and making sure your site is search engine friendly.
Even better, spend time getting to know your customers or site visitors and find out what terms they use to search, what they are looking for when they arrive at your site and what they think you can do to improve their experiences while browsing your site.
This information will be more valuable to you than your PageRank and the content you put on your site in response to your customers experiences will go much further in advancing the goals of your website than a meta tag or twenty hastily tossed on your pages.
SEO Mistake #5: Obsessing Over Meta Tags
"Meta tags are so 1995."
Even so, you’ll still find a few web designers, programmers and unscrupulous SEO “professionals” who’ll insist that, in order to optimize your site for the search engines, all you need to do is fill your keyword and description meta tags with all your relevant keywords (and then some) – and keep an eye on your PageRank.
If you’re new to this search engine optimization business, you probably have no idea what a meta tag or PageRank is. Here are a couple of definitions, just for you:
Meta Tag: These are tags placed in the head of your HTML pages that give the visitor’s browser, or the search engine spider, information about the page. Two mid-90s search engines, Infoseek (now defunct) and AltaVista (now owned by Yahoo!), first popularized the keywords tag, which they used to determine what each page on a website was about.
However, by 1997, search engines realized that spammers were misusing the tag to make pages rank for terms that were completely irrelevant to the page’s content. Search engines completely stopped giving so much weight to the keyword meta tag information by 2002.
That said, the description tag is still important. It does not affect how your page is ranked, or what keyword phrases your page will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for, but the meta description tag is displayed under your page’s title in some of the SERPs.
We'll cover page rank in the next article. In the meantime, stop on by the new Volition website and get a jump with your own personalized site review.
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