The Importance of Page Rank

The aim of all on-line businesses is to be seen. To have increased traffic come to your site. This either means an extensive (and expensive) advertising campaign, or attempting to grow your site organically by gaining in-bound links. This is important as the number of in-bound links affects your page rank in Google and hence the positioning of your website within Google's results.

In effect, page rank is the means by which Google judges the 'worth' of a web page. Google themselves define Page Rank as:

Page Rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual pages value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important'.

What this means is that a link coming into your site counts as a positive vote in favour of your site by the internet community. The more incoming links you have then the more the internet community 'likes' your site and the more important your site is deemed to be.

The Page Rank algorithm itself was initially designed by Larry Page (hence Page rank) and later Sergei Brin (the founders of Google) at Stanford University in 1995, as part of a research project to design a new kind of search engine. In 1998 this led to the founding of Google.

What the page rank is attempting to measure is the probability that a person clicking links at random will end-up at your site. As part of this measurement the page rank of the page linking to you is measured. The more high-ranking pages that link to your site, then the better your overall ranking. Google's algorithm also likes links to sites to be grown organically. As a result uni-directional links to your site (so-called non-reciprocal links) count for more than reciprocal links (this is an attempt at removing, or at least reducing, the effects of link exchanges from the system).

This also means that established sites, with lots of in-bound links almost naturally rank higher than younger sites. The catch-22 of the system is that if you have a new site then you have no page rank, so you do not rate highly in Google's listings which means no-one can find your site so you can't get in-coming links to improve your page rank and make your site more visible.

Google's aim is that if you have a good site with good content then these incoming links will appear as your site is discussed in various forums and on various blogs. However, if youre a new site or you have content buried deep within your site how do you get a leg-up in the page rank game.

One way is to write reviews and articles and to submit these to review and article sites as you can add your URLs to these articles and reviews.

Another excellent way to gain in-coming links and page rank is to submit your site to link directories. Directories both catalogue links so that users can have easy access to them but they also publish these links on the web so that they can be found and indexed by search engines. These are excellent for getting your site noticed. However, there are some problems with these directories as it can take a long time for your site to be reviewed (up to several months). There is usually some kind of quality measure and deep links (even sub-directories) may not be accepted. As a result its not guaranteed that your site will be accepted.

If you want your site (especially deep links or multiple directories if your site is large) to be accepted then it may be better to go for the One Dollar Links Directories where you pay $1 for guaranteed inclusion into a directory and you can submit both sub-directories and links as deep as you like. These sites will usually accept multiple submissions so that you can get a large percentage of your site included for less than $10.

When considering submissions to links directories it is important that you only choose 'SEO-friendly directories' where the links to your sites are presented as plain links and there will be no more than 100 links on a page. This ensures that the search engines' indexing spiders actually index your URLs. This is especially important for the $1 links sites as they often present more than 100 links on a page.

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is the webmaster of the Celtnet Information site which offers news and information on various aspects of Internet Marketing and website design. As a service he has a directory of almost 800 SEO-friendly free links directories and a directory of SEO-friendly one dollar links directories. He has also started a new section on his site where you can submit internet products and website reviews and notices.