Pagerank Factors

In my post about Pagerank and Link Juice, I mentioned the factors of creating pagerank, but now I'm going to discuss them at a little bit of length. The factors of pagerank are:

• How long your site has been on the internet.
• How large your site is.
• How many inbound links your site has.
• What your bounce rate is.

How long your site has been on the internet. Search engines like sites that have existed for at least 2 years. These sites have shown that they are not a "fly by night" search engine spam site, but that they have at least SOME value to the internet.

How large your site is. Search engines like sites that have relevant content. In fact, search engines seem to have this kind of equation: Content = Good. More Content = Better. If your site is about antique tea sets, having content about antique tea sets will gain you more pagerank. Why? Because you're providing more information to the world about your subject, and the more information you provide, the more valuable visitors are going to think your site are, and thus search engines will also think your site is more valuable.

How many inbound links your site has. Not just ANY old link will do, but links from "authority sites". In other words, if you get a link from someone who sells links (link farms), it's worthless as best, and harmful at worst. There are plenty of link farms, so do your self a favor and DON'T EVER BUY LINKS. Buying links to your site is usually a scam that will only take your money and possibly get you in trouble with search engines. Link farms are considered to be a form of spam. Buying ad space from a site that is relevant is not the same, so there's no problem with buying legitimate ad space on a legitimate website. If you get a link from someone else who writes about antique tea sets, that link helps pagerank. If that site is very large and well established (amazon, wikipedia, etc) and the link is relevant to your site, you get even more pagerank!

What your bounce rate is. This is actually a debate in the SEO community as to whether this actually contributes, and I believe it does simply because it makes sense. A "bounce" is when someone comes to your site, and leaves without clicking on anything. If your site has a high bounce rate, your site probably doesn't have good and/or relevant content or it's built poorly, and you will not gain page rank. If your site has a low bounce rate, your site probably has lots of good and/or relevant content that users enjoy and your site is built well. It's in the best interest of search engines to give high ranking to sites and pages that visitors like.

In summary, build a good site with content that your visitors will love, and share it!


Cheers,
Chris

The User Experience

The User Experience is probably the single most important thing to consider when creating a site. Without a good user experience, SEO is pointless. What good is it to get to the top of the search engines if visitors to your site can't figure out how to use your site?

A couple of years back, I did research for a fitness company that needed to find equipment. I had 126 company websites to visit to asses what kind of equipment they had, how much it would cost, what the quality was, etc. I only ended up contacting 31 companies. The biggest reason; they were the only companies that had websites that were good enough to use. Please notice that I didn't say that they had "great" sites, I said they were "good enough".

$2.1 MILLION in contracts was lost by the companies with bad sites. I had so many to visit and such little time to do it, that if I couldn't use their site to find what I was looking for within a minute, I HAD to move on. Unlike the 3 Second Rule, I gave them a FULL MINUTE before I moved on.

I was AMAZED by how many sites were beautiful, but useless. Many companies had contact information that was difficult to find, poor navigation, security warnings, slowness, and sometimes I couldn't even figure out what the heck it was that a particular company did! If I go to your company's website, and I click through a half dozen pages and can't figure out what your company does, even in the most general sense, I've given you a more than fair chance.

As I was doing this research, I just kept thinking, "Can't these companies just make a simple site that says what they do?!" That's all I wanted. Just by doing the MOST BASIC things to their websites, these companies would have had a chance to get a piece of that huge contract I was working with.

FREEBIE!! As an SEO professional, this is probably the most important image I have ever seen on the internet. I give it to all of my prospective clients as a gift, because I want them to win, with or without me. This image was created by cognitive psychologists and user interface experts. The experts that created this actually tracked the eye movement of thousands of people across thousands of websites. This image is a basic website layout. The different areas are shaded based on how much attention a visitor pays to each area. Darker areas are where users pay the most attention and lighter areas are where users pay less attention to. Use this image wisely!



Cheers,
Chris