Today I discover an interesting phenomenon with Google ranking. One of my PR1 website actually ranked above my other PR4 website for the keywords: singapore seo. These websites are:

• http://ShiHengcheong.com - PR1
• http://DesignerSEO.com - PR4

Let’s try to use the results above to examine how pagerank affects search engine ranking.

It is definitely a MYTH that you need high pagerank value for your web page in order to be ranked in the top 3 pages of the search engine result listing.

Check out this keyword “blog marketing“, there are over 250,000,000 results. And my friend Kian Ann’s 3 months old Blogopreneur.com - currently still a PR0 website - is ranked at 26th!

High PR will help, but there are more important factors that you should focused on - as illustrated by the above Google ranking.

Why You Do Not Need High Pagerank

In most cases, you will need a very high PR to compete for very competitive keywords.

However, if you believe that The Long Tail economic theory works in e-commerce then you should know why we are talking about optimizing your web pages for the less popular and less competitive keywords. We want to be able to get our web pages to the top of the organic search engine listing as quickly as possible without incurring the high cost of traditional media and PPC advertising.

On-Page Optimization

Take a look at ShiHengCheong.com.
And here’s DesignerSEO.com.

There is definitely more content in DesignerSEO.com than ShiHengCheong.com. In fact, you can find more occurrences of “Singapore” and “SEO” in DesignerSEO.com than ShiHengCheong.com.

In terms of on-page optimization, DesignerSEO.com has more text and content search optimization. It is much easier to work on this site as there is more content to help boost the frequency of the targeted keywords and more pages to optimize its internal linking structure.

However, we have to know if this page is optimized for the targeted keywords. Generally, DesignerSEO.com is targeting “singapore seo” however, the main niche keywords are: seo web design training workshop singapore.

And, the targeted keywords for ShiHengCheong.com: singapore seo specialist which is closer to the keywords “singapore seo”.

This is one reason why ShiHengCheong.com does better for the keywords singapore seo but nowhere to be found for the keywords “seo training in singapore” or “web design course in singapore“.

Proper on-page optimization will ensure that your web pages are search engine friendly and “crawlable”. However, in terms of actual getting in the top search engine ranking, off-page optimization rules!

The Seven Off-Page Things That You Must Do To Get Top Search Engine Ranking

1. Keyword targeted inbound text link is very important for you to rank well in Google.

2. A keyword rich text link from within the main content text is more “powerful” than links from the sidebar menu. You want a link from a page with content that is related to your website.

3. Use only the targeted keywords in the anchored text. Try not to dilute the focus by add other keywords. Stop words such as and, the, an, a, or are OK. You only need 4 or 5 quality inbound links to get ranked in the top 30 for a no-so-competitive keyword. You should be thinking along the Long Tail concept and optimize for profitable rare keywords than popular competitive keywords.

4. If possible, get link from sites that are frequently visited by Googlebot, SLURP and MSNbot, such as a high PR website (PR5 or higher) or popular blogs - these are criteria for good quality links. Examples of a popular blog is Blogopreneur.com which is visited by the important search engine spiders several times a day even though it is still at PR0.

5. Get good quality inbound links also to your internal pages. Make sure that the web page or blog post, where your link is placed, has been indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN. It would be nice to have link from high PR but if you are new, even PR0 can do. The important point is to have your link placed strategically in that web page.

6. It is easy to get ranked in the top 30 if you get help from your friends. Look for strategic link partners among people that you know. Work in team.

7. If you already have a well-spidered website/blog, don’t be stingy. Link to others who have good content first, eventually you will get more links in return.

Since you are reading this, you are either well verse in the art of SEO or you are struggling to get visible on the search engine. If you are the former, please drop me a comment. If you are the later, you can come attend my SEO Web Design Workshop in January 2007.

Here’s how I helped my friend Andy to get top 10 ranking in Google in about 10 days. He wanted this new website, AmeliaHun.com, to be ranked for the keywords “Coolest Baby on the Planet” - a website dedicated to his newborn baby daughter.

It is more for fun than anything else that he selected such a cool long tail keyword - not a competitive keyword indeed.

But what the heck, it’s still an SEO experiment and you have to get your optimization tactics right to be visible in the top 30.

If you can get a not-so-competitive keyword ranked in the top 10 on Google and Yahoo then you are on the right track. All you need to do for more competitive keywords is to repeat what you’ve done right and create more keyword optimized pages for the next 3 to 6 months.

This was what Andy has done. The domain name AmeliaHun.com was registered on Aug 22, 2006. He did not do anything until Nov 9, 2006 when he was in Kuala Lumpur to demonstrate how easily and quickly one can create a simple web page. Yes, he created that homepage in front of a live audience. So please do not expect a fanciful web page - there are only some text and a couple of pictures. However, he is pretty good at SEO and the resulting homepage is well optimized for the keywords: coolest baby on the planet.

When he asked me on Nov 12, 2006 to point a text link to his new website, I actually gave him 2 and not 1 text link. The first one is a link in the form a list item in a blog post about backlinks and the other one is embedded in the first paragraph of a blog post talking about the coolest baby at http://shihengcheong.com/blogs/2006/11/coolest-baby-on-planet.html.

Yesterday, Nov 21, 2006, I was told that AmeliaHun.com was ranked the 6th Coolest Baby on the Planet by Google.

That’s top 10 ranking in Google achieved in less than 10 days. Congratulation!

And, guess what happen today? My blog post about the coolest baby is ranked Number 1 for the search term Singapore’s coolest baby on Google.!

Latest Search Ranking Updates
Nov 24, 2006

• AmeliaHun.com is ranked NUMBER 1 and 2 in Google.
• AmeliaHun.com is ranked Number 3 in Live Search(MSN).
• This post put www.TIMMGuru.com into the 17th position in Yahoo.

Nov 29, 2006

• AmeliaHun.com maintains NUMBER 1 and 2 position in Google.
• AmeliaHun.com is ranked Number 1 in Live Search(MSN).
• AmeliaHun.com is ranked Number 6 in Yahoo.
• ShiHengCheong.com is ranked Number 1 for the keywords singapore coolest baby in Google.

Dec 7, 2006

• AmeliaHun.com maintains NUMBER 1 and 2 position in Google, Number 1 in Live Search(MSN) and Number 7 in Yahoo.
• As for the keywords singapore coolest baby, TIMMGuru.com is ranked Number 1 and http://shihengcheong.com/blogs is ranked Number 4 in Yahoo, and in Google and MSN http://shihengcheong.com/blogs/2006/11/coolest-baby-on-planet.html is ranked Number 1.

This happened during the Las Vegas Pubcon a few days ago. Some SEO heavyweight gathered and gave comments on various web sites during the Interactive Site Review session. The panel of SEO experts consisted of Matt Cutts(Google), Tim Mayer(Yahoo), Greg Boser(WebGuerilla) and Danny Sullivan(SearchEngineWatch).

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The complete subject line should be…

Why Google didn’t like this blog As Much As Yahoo Does?

I suspect that I’ve added a thing in this blog that Google didn’t like. That is the Archive List.

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First let’s understand what is Google Pagerank(PR). According to Google corporate information on technology,

Pagerank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value…

Now that we know what pagerank is, let’s see how we can improve our web pages pagerank values.

Pagerank is important as a measure of votes of confidence. It is important that you get as many links from other web pages as possible. Note that I said web pages and not web sites. Pagerank value is given to individual web page, not to the web site. So it is important that you get links from pages that share the same topic as your web page.

Usually, you will solicit backlinks to your homepage. However, you should also get backlinks to your internal pages. As a rule of thumb, you can spread your inbound links in the ratio of 60:40 - 60% to your internal pages and 40% to the main homepage.

In order to get links to your internal pages, these pages must have useful and interesting content. It is important that all pages are planned before you starting writing your first word. This is to ensure that your web pages are linked in a relevant manner. So that you can score better for Google’s Hypertext-Matching Analysis:

Google’s search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google’s technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Well, let me emphasize that you should focus on getting more quality links than worrying about your pagerank value. Google usually updates the pagerank value for all web pages every 2 to 3 months so you will be stuck with your current value for a long time before you’ll see any changes. However, as you are building your backlinks, the SERP of your web pages may have already improved and you will see increase in traffic before you’ll see an increase in your pagerank value.

The Old Ways of Getting Links

Traditionally, you can get backlinks by submitting to free and paid directories, include partner links or resources pages and solicit for reciprocal link partners.

Don’t get me wrong, these traditional methods are still effective and can grow your link popularity over a period time.

Links building is a tedious process. So you may want to make use of reciprocal link partners software and link analysis software such as SEO Elite, Arelis, Optilink, Traffic Travis and etc. to help you save time and automate some of the tedious process.

Links Building - There are Better and Faster Ways:

• Link Bait
• Press Release
• Article Distribution
• Blog Trackback

Since these are advanced techniques, I will discuss more in depth each of these methods in my future posts.

Someone ever asked me this “your site is PR1… How am I supposed to hire you as my consultant?”

You should. Because I can get a PR1 web page ranked in the top 30 results of Google for your targeted keywords. Isn’t it how you’ve found me on the web to ask me this question?

In fact, I see SEO ranking and PR as the “chicken or egg” paradox.

Let me explain.

If you don’t have good search engine visibility, how are you supposed to grow your backlinks and have high PR; but if you do not have high PR you will not be able to rank well for competitive keywords.

And the common belief is that when you have high PR, you will do well in the search engines. This is but half true. PR is a value given by Google and has nothing to do with Yahoo and Live(MSN) Search.

Read my yesterday post if you want to know more about the relationship between pagerank and SEO ranking.

I do not have pages with high PR, my highest attained PR was 5. Why? I have not spent much time and money on link building campaign yet as I choose not to compete for popular keywords. So there is no need for high PR to give me an extra edge. I just want to solve your practical problem, I want to use the most direct and simplest solution that costs me the least resources. If on-page optimization is all you need to get into the top 30 then do that first and worry about the more expensive off-page optimization later.

The home page at ShiHengCheong.com is ranked No.1 for the keywords Singapore SEO Specialist in Google and it is PR1. Get the point!

I observed recently that Google is using Description meta tag in their search results. Previously, it would simply select various bits of text from your web to give visitors an idea of what that particular page was about.

However, now that Google is using your Description meta tag it is important that you have a good description for each of your web page. A well written description will probably increase traffic to your site, especially since many other webmasters don’t give it much importance.

<meta name=”description” content=”A short paragraph to describe of your web page here”>

From now on think of your meta-tag description as a good headline on a well written article that gives the reader an incentive to read the article.