Website owners often spend most of their time researching how they can to improve their Google rankings and get their website noticed. It is common knowledge that PageRank is an important factor in how well a particular page of content ranks within the Google search results.
What is PageRank?
Many website SEO specialists will tell you from experience that other factors besides PageRank, such as keyword density and placement, have recently taken a larger role in determining your website rankings. No one will argue that PageRank has become less relevant, but there is significant evidence to suggest that PageRank is not quite as important as it once was.
PageRank is largely based upon the number and quality of links from other sites to your content or web page. Since SEO consultants spend a lot of time improving websites, you have to wonder how important is PageRank in modern search engine optimisation?
To illustrate this point, I used a very useful tool you can find at prlookup.com. The tool returns regular Google query results with one interesting addition they also give the pagerank for every web page. You can type in any word or phrase and see the pagerank of those web pages that rank well (or not so well) for that keyword.
Looking at the results you will notice that some sites with low PRs do surprisingly well in the results, while some higher PR sites do quite poorly. Some of this difference can be contributed to sheer content that is, how many times the keyword actually shows up on the web page. Google takes a close look at keyword usage and density in determining ranking.
Let’s take a more quantitative look at this. Taking 20 of the most popular keywords from rankpulse.com and entering them in prlookup.com, it is possible to get a better feel for the importance of page rank. Looking at the first five results, I wanted to see how many followed in order of highest PR to lowest PR. Surely, out of the results for 20 keywords, a good portion of them will display such an order, right?
Well, the answer is 35.4%. That is the difference between the average PR of the top 5 sites that I chose (35.2) and the average PR of those in order of entering the top 5. For three of the keywords, the difference is less than 10%, and for six others the difference is between 1% and 2%.
So the lesson is that if you are interested in keywords that are searched for, your chance of entering the top 5 positions increases. However, if you are more interested in keywords that are not searched for as regularly, then your site will have to fight harder to occupy those search engine rankings.
Okay, now its time to get to work…
Refine Your Keywords for Top Google Rankings
Now that you have your keywords you want to use for your site, be sure to use them all. As said before, 3 or 4 keywords separated by spaces should be enough.
If you keyword is not naturally found in your content, you have to work on using it anyway. The first place I do this is to write the content, making sure that I apply my keywords. After I have the content down, I use MS Word to proof read the content, making sure that the keywords are obvious.
Remember, when you are concentrating on your content and doing your keyword research. This lets the spiders identify your keywords before you go any further and gives you a better chance of getting into the good books of MSN and even Google. You have to remember that when you are doing this, it is about thinking the way customers would speak about your product or service.
Most copywriters approach keywords and keyword research wrong. They get stuck in thinking that the keywords are a blank check and when they have queries about keywords, they have to come up with some catchall phrase that is going to satisfy the query. It is a step I take very seriously – Any attempt to manipulate Google by stuffing in keywords that have no relation whatsoever to the site itself will always come back to haunt you.
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