SMALL BUSINESS SEO

By Dave Curtis

Page rank doesn’t mean a hill of beans, what matters is SERPs (Search Engine Return Pages) for the terms and phrases optimized for. Page Rank doesn’t rely upon content, keywords, domain name/site age, number of pages on a site, how often the site content is updated, when it is set to expire, or even the amount of traffic to a site. Page Rank is about inbound links and here’s proof:

http://www.lisabarone.com (a WordPress Blog) has a Page Rank of 4 (as of today, Dec. 30, 2009).

Page Rank 4

It has just one page and it clearly states “Oh, hey. You found me. At some point I may put content here. Just not today.” – the rest of the page is default WordPress text.

It also has outbound links, but they are nofollow, so even though Google now treats nofollows a bit differently it doesn’t matter.

As evidenced by HubSpot.com’s Website Grader, Google hasn’t been to the site to index it in a while, and the last crawl date isn’t available:

What the site DOES have is somewhere between 16 and 24 backlinks from some rather hefty sites (seen here: http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/lisabarone.com )

Website Grader shows 23 backlinks:

…and Microsoft-Watch.org shows 24 links according to Yahoo:

So – Page Rank isn’t content. It isn’t number of documents in the site (or a Lateral Semantic Indexing related thing), it isn’t domain age (this site was registered in 2007)

…and it isn’t anything else but inbound links. Alexa doesn’t even show any appreciable traffic going to the site.  What’s more, the site is set to expire in just a few months – one of the known SEO influencer’s. According to Domain Dossier (above) and HubSpot’s analysis (below):

The domain for this website is set to expire in less than a year (March 13, 2010 ).

Note: All HubSpot data on Lisabarone.com can be seen here: http://websitegrader.com/site/www.lisabarone.com Lisabarone.com ranks a 54 in WebsiteGrader (click above link to view this result) which is fairly high for what is on the site, but definitely not a good score.  (Check your own site using Website Grader – do not be happy with a low number like 54! It is still a failing grade!)

This is a good example of the meaning and importance of Google’s page rank. As Lisa hasn’t done anything with her site for a while outside of set it up and add a Twitter Feed to it, it makes a perfect example.  From what I know of Lisa Barone (having once worked with Bruce Clay, one of the nation’s top SEO firms, and now working with Rae Hoffman, North America’s most famous and best qualified Internet Marketer and expert in Affiliate Marketing and SEO) once she finally does decide to pay attention to expanding this blog she will most certainly rank very close to 100 in HubSpot’s Website Grader (as do I) and will also most certainly attain a much higher page rank – not as a goal, but simply as a side effect of any additional powerful backlinks.

Whilst a PR 4 isn’t the greatest in the world, it certainly is above what most well optimized sites that show up on page one in Google have. I personally “like” page rank, but it’s not as required as good backlinks from strong websites that are related to whatever niche you want your site to belong to.