11/25/2008
How Critical are Search Engine Rankings and PageRank to Your SEO Strategy?
Many business owners obsess about search engine rankings and Google PR. In one sense, they’re wise to be concerned about these matters. After all, the likelihood that a business will be located online by a potential customer if its link is buried on page 25 of search results for its main keywords is at best, slim. Even on the first page of search results, 70% of traffic goes to the first three links (which leaves just 30% for the other seven listings).
And what about PageRank? Isn’t that just as important as search engine ranking? In fact, doesn’t a high PR virtually ensure a higher ranking with search engines? Since PR represents the level of confidence that the whole body of Internet users has in a website – based on the number and quality of inbound links to the site – PR is definitely one component Google considers when calculating and ranking search results. (For a more detailed explanation, read How PageRank Works and Why the Original PR Formula May Be Flawed, by Si Fishkin, at SEOmoz.) *
There’s no question that both rankings are important to a company’s overall SEO strategy. Yet, we also need to remember that they comprise only one part of that strategy.
In Six Things You Might Be Doing Wrong (and How to Fix Them)! – posted at Search Engine Watch – Carrie Hill states the following about the factors she considers even more important than rankings:
Are you making money? Is the return on the money you’re investing in search making you exponentially more money? Obsessing over the little green bar (which isn’t updated very often) or the rank of your listing will give you an ulcer — and position three can make you just as much money, and in some cases even more, than position one can.
According to Hill, worrying too much about these rankings is only one of the six things you might be doing wrong in executing your company’s SEO strategy. (Visit the above link to learn more about the other five.)
Search engine ranking and Google PageRank do indeed play an important role in search engine optimization – but so do link-building, keyword research, optimal website navigation, uniqueness of content, and ongoing optimization techniques. So, don’t merely focus on one or two of these areas. Instead, put all of them to work to create the most comprehensive SEO strategy possible for your business.
* If you’d like to go back to the real source and ultimate SEO authority, consult the following article by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, founders of Google: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine–particularly the sections on PageRank, Search, and Ranking. (The above SEOmoz post also contains a link to this article.)
