Website Page Rank Checker

While surfing around the forums I constantly see threads from people asking how to check their website page rank. There's also the confusion between page rank (PR), SERP and Alexa ranking. Here is a clarification for all of my readers who may still be confused about all of this.

PR, or Page Rank, is assigned to a website by Google based on backlinks to your site. These links to your site act as a kind of voting system to determine how popular your site is among all the others and its ranked on a scale from 1 to 10. Contrary to many who argue this in the forums, PR is NOT about getting as many backlinks as possible! If you buy into those "blast of" type scams then you are just throwing your money away. It's important to realize that your Page Rank is determined by QUALITY over quantity. A handful of good backlinks from authority sites will raise your ranking MUCH higher than 1000's of useless ones from a "bad neighborhood".

SERP is simply your position on the Search Engine Results Page. Are you in position #1 on the first page of results for your keywords? Good for you!! Also contrary to popular myth, your SERP position has NOTHING to do with your PR! Do a search for ANY keyword or phrase in a search engine and you'll find that each website listed in the results has a different page rank. The site in SERP position #1 is NOT necessarily going to be the one with the highest PR.

Alexa Rank is based more on your website traffic. If you have a lot of visitors then your ranking with be lower (better) then when you started. This is a rank showing your position among all the other sites on the net, according to traffic stats. The site with the most traffic has an Alexa of 1, while a site just starting out with only a couple of hits a day will be something like 24 million. This used to be determined by the Alexa Toolbar, which users installed in the browser while surfing sites, but they changed that a few months ago and now bring other factors into it to bring a more realistic formula in determining a site's ranking.

They are several places on the net where you can check these various rankings for your site, but the one I recommend most is Site Rank Checker simply because it brings all these ranks together on one easy to read page. I hope your site rans well! All the best to you...

Are Meta Tags Keywords Useful Anymore?

I posted before about the importance of keywords in general for good SEO work, so I guess this could be considered as part 2 of that post. Here I'll discuss the importance of Meta Tags. Are they still useful?

There is some debate recently among SEO specialists as to whether or not you even need meta tags anymore. Apparently, some of the biggest search engines no longer consider them important and will either dismiss them or index them only as a general reference for your site category. I know of at least one person with a site on the the first Google SERP for their keywords of choice without ANY meta tags at all or even a site title!

Gone are the days when keyword stuffing would get you top results. Now, it's all about content, and that's how it should be, really. A site without useful content isn't of much value to anyone, so why should they read it? Search engine results are becoming more about presenting useful content to the searchers and surfers on the internet, and with the implementation of "web 2.0", this can be seen as a step in the right direction. Just make sure your site content is useful and relevant to the keyword results you wish to be found in and you'll be ready for the latest Internet revolution.

Until the search engine algorithms change yet again...