Google is omnipresent in the online and mobile worlds (think organic search, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Street view, et al) and enjoys by far the biggest share of the user audience. So getting on Google’s good side is never a bad idea if you’re looking to get your business found by potential customers online.

Registering a Google My Business account helps your company get found in organic Google searches and across the many and varied matrix of Google product offerings. Something that is guaranteed to bring measurable, quantifiable and significant benefits to Australian small business owners and SMEs everywhere.

Google My Business is a free, quick, easy and convenient way for businesses, products, brands and area-specific service providers to manage, promote and ultimately grow their online presence via Google. 

The Google My Business dashboard (that you can access once your account has been setup) allows you to perform various tasks including (but not limited to):

• Inputting and maintain your business / service information on Google.
• Acquiring customers / clients with your own Google+ page.
• People who follow your Google+ business page can provide feedback and show appreciation for your business / products / services by writing reviews and posts.
• They can also use the +1 button in order to endorse your products / services on various Google platforms including Google+, Google Search, Google Maps and even on ads.
• Measuring and tracking follower engagement using Insights for Google+ pages and posts.
• Viewing information on any Google Analytics account and YouTube channels associated with your Business account.
• Directly creating and tracking performance of AdWords Express (Pay Per Click - PPC) advertising campaigns.

The two categories of local pages available while signing up for a Google My Business account are:

1. Storefront businesses: This category should be selected if customers are served at your business location and you want your customers to be able to locate your business on Google Maps.

• Examples: retail stores, restaurants, hotels, auto repair shops.
  

1. Service area businesses: This category should be selected if you serve your customers at their location, within a particular service area and you want your customers to be able to see your service area on Google Maps.

• Examples: taxi services, plumbers, roofing contractors, pizza delivery services.
  

Setting up a basic Google My Business account is a straightforward process. What follows is a step-by-step guide to help you get started:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/business/ and sign in with your Gmail account (create one if you don’t have it already).
   
2. In the prompted area, search for your business by name and address.
   
3. If your correct business information shows up in the search results, click on it and proceed to step 6 below.
   
4. If your correct business information does not show up in the search results, click the option “None of these matches, add your business”.
   
5. Fill in the required information (Name, Address etc.) in order to add your business.
   
6. Google should create your Google+ page at this stage. Click the “I am authorised to manage this business” option and click Continue.
   
7. Click “Mail me my code” so that Google can mail a verification code to the address / location of your business.
   
8. Click “Add profile photo” to upload and add a photo to the account profile.
   
9. Add the remaining profile information fields like Business Hours, Contact Information, your Website URL. You can also add / upload more photos if desired.
   
10. Add an introduction to your page and click “Done editing”.
    

This should complete the setup of a standard Google My Business account.

It is important to remember to verify your business with Google once you receive the verification code from them (see point 7 above), because your business won’t show up across any of the Google platforms (organic SEO aside) until they are 100% sure you are the legitimate owner or representative of the business you’re listing, and that your company is physically located where you say it is (hence sending a postcard with a verification code on it to the address you’ve listed).

There are several ways to verify your business on Google My Business, but for the vast majority of Australian companies, verification will be done by Google sending you a postcard via Australia Post. This can take anything up to 2-3 weeks. During which time your business will NOT show up on Google Maps, etc.

The benefits of verifying your business with Google should be self-evident, but the long and the short if is that a verified Google My Business account will allow you to:

• Increase the chances of your business getting found across the various Google platforms including Google.com.au organic search and YouTube.
• Read customer reviews and respond.
• Get insights on where your customers are coming from and how they search for your business (keywords, etc), which feeds into your organic SEO and PPC strategies.

Shortly after you complete the verification, your business should start showing up on Google’s regular and local search results, on Google Maps and on Google plus.

It is important to remember that while the Google My Business profile page is more or less a static page (though it can be edited if required), your Google+ page (that got automatically created during the My Business account creation process) is a full-blown social networking presence for your business, and therefore, updating it regularly with routine actions like making posts, responding to comments, creating and adding people to Circles (groups), following others etc, will significantly help drive engagement and yield maximum benefits to your business.

Click here to get your company on Google My Business.

As a novelist, screenwriter and SEO copywriter, it's not too much of a stretch to say that words are my life. In my younger years, when I was a professional film actor, it was the spoken word that held my focus. But since then it's all been about the written word.

Like most writers I am obsessive about what words to use, in what order, and why. On the top end of that obsession you deal with issues of thematics, tone and voice. Of narrative and of structure. And at the bottom end you deal with spelling, punctuation and grammar.

This perfectionism (because that is surely what all writers suffer from) means that even something as mundane as an email or an sms / text, must be written well and correctly spelled. Language after all is a symphony made up of an endless amount of notes. And it only takes one 'bum' note to spoil your enjoyment of the music. As my late sainted mum used to say, "If you say it correctly, you'll spell it correctly". And in the digital age, we can perhaps flip that to read: "If you spell it correctly, you'll say it correctly".

Imagine my surprise then, when I read how Laszlo Bock (such a great name - must pinch that for my next novel!) Google's head of HR, revealed that Google instantly delete any CVs that contain spelling mistakes.

Apparently the Human Resources department at Google receives over 50,000 resumes per week. And, so Laszlo told Business Insider, if you have so much as a single spelling mistake on your resume, it ends up in the trash.

Laszlo, who has himself reputedly reviewed over 20,000 resumes, said that upward of 58 percent of resumes Google receives have "Spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes, or noun-verb agreement errors".

When quizzed as to why he is so obsessive about spelling mistakes, et al, Laszlo said: "Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality".

Which is pretty much what we writers have been saying all along!

*******

Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

Google have just announced that they have this week started rolling out the new and improved Panda algorithm. The roll out is expected to take a week to two weeks to totally proliferate the internet.  

This Google Panda update is influenced by webmaster and user feedback, which has allowed Google to eek out a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content. This will result in a higher percentage and greater diversity in search results, and will enable high-quality small and medium-sized sites to rank higher against larger and traditionally more powerful sites.

This is a nice touch from Google, as the quality of the content should be the ultimate deciding factor in a page's worth, not the overarching power of the TLD it comes from. Sure, great content doesn't exist in a vacuum, but just like each individual page has its own page rank, so does each individual page have its own on-page ranking factors, with how great the content is being by far the most important.

It is expected that approximately 3-5% of all queries will be impacted.

*******

Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

The underlying framework and methodology driving social media development in 2010 was visual. In a social media landscape lorded over by words (think the original incarnations of Facebook and Twitter) 2010 saw both Pinterest (March 2010) and Instagram (October 2010) burst onto the scene with a focus on the insatiable human appetite for visual stimulation, via pictures and videos.

Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and is an online social networking service that focuses on mobile photo-sharing and video-sharing. It allows users to take pictures and videos and then easily and conveniently share them via a number of other popular social networking platforms such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr etc. Users are also able to apply a variety of digital filters to the pictures and videos they post.

Like many internet trail-blazers, Kevin Systrom went to Stanford University, graduating in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Management Science & Engineering. His initial foray into internet start-ups was as an intern at a company called ‘Odeo’, a search and directory website for RSS-syndicated audio and video that allowed users to record, create and share podcasts with a Flash-based interface. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Odeo. But you probably will have heard of what Odeo would eventually morph into. A little known company called, ‘Twitter’. 

After graduation, Kevin cut his teeth with a couple of very productive years working at Google, where he was tasked with developing Google Reader, Gmail and associated products as part of the Corporate Development team. 

Kevin has a longstanding love for photography, which he and co-founder Mike Krieger combined brilliantly with the launch of Instagram.

Mike Krieger, like his long-time friend, Kevin Systrom, also graduated from Stanford University, where he studied Symbolic Systems, specialising in Human-Computer Interaction. 

While doing his undergrad, Mike interned with Foxmarks (now Xmarks) as a software developer, and at Microsoft's PowerPoint team as a Product Manager. 

His Master's thesis was a brilliant discourse on how user interfaces can be utilised to support large scale collaborations.

After graduating from Stanford, Mike worked for a year and a half at Meebo as a front-end engineer and user experience designer, before eventually joining the Instagram team doing design & development.

In March 2010, Burbn Inc. (the parent company of Instagram) received seed funding of $500,000. This was seven months before the actual photo-sharing social networking service was made available to the public. 

In February 2011, a few months after the public launch, Instagram raised their series A funding round of $7 million from a consortium of venture capital funds. The company was valued at $25 million during this funding round.

Some 14 months later, in April 2012, Instagram raised another funding round of $50 million from venture capitalists, with a valuation of $500 million.

Immediately after launch, Instagram started gaining huge popularity and reached a registered user base of a 100 million people in April 2012. This was technically only one and a half years after the official launch. At which time the company was acquired by Facebook for a mouth watering $1 billion (paid via a mix of cash and stock).

This purchase was by far Facebook’s most significant acquisition and was a definite indicator of how important mobile and photo sharing were becoming to Facebook. An interesting parallel for this purchase can perhaps be drawn with Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. In as much as it demonstrated an internet behemoth with expertise in a particular area (search, in the case of Google, social media in the case of Facebook) acquiring expertise in an adjacent (but different) area, via purchasing a fast-growing start-up.

This purchase was unusual for Facebook, as its previous purchases of other start-ups were modest by comparison.  

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired 
a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. 
But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook 
and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”

Facebook CEO and Founder, Mark Zuckerberg 

Instagram allows users to upload photos and short 15-second videos, apply digital filters to create colour and contrast effects, and then enables them to share this content through social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Instagram deliberately restricts images to a square shape, in a nod and a wink to those wonderful instant Polaroid photos many of us grew up with. Instagram users can interact with content posted by other members by ‘liking’ it, or by following the user that posted it. They can also search for content using hashtags.

The Instagram mobile app is distributed primarily through Apple’s App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone Store. The app is supported on iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch, Android and Windows handsets, while third-party Instagram apps are available for BlackBerry 10 and Nokia-Symbian handsets and devices.

Boasting 200 million active users in 2014, Instagram’s user-base growth over the years has been nothing short of phenomenal:

Other important milestones and achievements for Instagram over the years include:

• Instagram was declared the ‘iPhone App of the Year’ in December 2011.
• Instagram app for Android Froyo version 2.2 launched in April 2012 got downloaded more than a million times in less than a day.
  
• By July 2012, Instagram was rated more than a million times on Google Play, to become the 5th app ever to reach a million ratings. 
  
• As of April 2013, Instagram was rated more than four million times on Google Play.
  

A look at statistics from September 2013 reveals that a total of 16 billion photos and videos were shared via Instagram, with an average of 55 million new shares being made per day. At time of writing (August 2014) Instagram users are making an average of 1.2 billion new Likes per day.

According to another 2013 study, some 13% of all Internet users worldwide were found to be using Instagram. And some 70% of Instagram users were found to be logging on to the site daily, with 35% logging in more than once a day. 

A 2014 study revealed that the Instagram mobile app user base registered a 25% growth between December 2013 and May 2014. And as of March 2014, a total of some 20 billion photos had been shared via Instagram. It has also been reported that in 2014, an average of one thousand new comments get posted on Instagram every second.

Unlike something like Google + (where people sign up, but hardly ever use it), Instagram demonstrably shows us that people come back again and again to the platform to both post and interact with other users.  And it’s this interaction (much like Facebook itself) that allows us to see why Facebook valued the company at $1 billion in 2012.

As the following Statista chart demonstrates, Instagram has been found to be the 2nd most popular social media app among American smartphone users aged between 18 and 34:

According to a 2013 study, some 25% of the Fortune 500 companies were using Instagram as a social media networking platform. A 2014 study indicates that some 43% of the top 100 brands post daily on Instagram, with the average number of posts made by these (top 100) brands on Instagram per week standing at 5.5. Some 65% of the world’s top 100 brands had Instagram accounts (as at 2013).

In 2014, the average value of sales orders generated via Instagram referrals has been found to be a very respectable $66.75. In a late 2013 study, Instagram was also found to deliver the 4th highest (1.08%) conversion rate among all social media platforms and services, trailing only Facebook (1.85%), Vimeo and YouTube (1.16% each).

A 2014 survey conducted by Social Media Examiner reveals that Instagram is among the top 10 social media platforms used by online marketers.

According to the SocialMediaMarketingReport of 2014, some 28% of online and social media marketers use Instagram as one of their marketing channels. This report also indicates that some 42% of the marketers (that were polled during the survey on which this report is based) were planning to increase their use of Instagram as a social media marketing platform. As this report further indicates, a significantly higher number (49%) of B2C marketers are likely to increase marketing activity via Instagram than their B2B counterparts (32% of which said they will increase Instagram activity).

Interestingly, the same percentage of marketers (i.e. 42%) also expressed their willingness to learn more about Instagram as a social media marketing and optimisation platform.

To paraphrase the old adage from the W. P. Kinsella novel, ‘Shoeless Joe’ (popularised in the classic 1989 movie, ‘Field of Dreams’): ‘

And with more and more people flocking to this photo-sharing social network every day, it is not surprising that Instagram has emerged as one of the world's 'must use' platforms for businesses, online marketers and social media optimisers.

*******

Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

Tired of feeling invisible on the internet? Of all your competitors ranking on the first page of Google while you languish somewhere around page 100? Then maybe it's time to change how you approach your online marketing strategy. As that wise old saying goes, "How can you expect tomorrow to be any different, if you don't change what you do today?".

Call 0425 204 887 today, and as sure as the sun coming up in the east, your business will rank. With first page rankings guaranteed in the contract and thousands of first page rankings already obtained throughout Australia for businesses just like yours, it's the easiest phone call you'll ever have to make.

*******

Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

Now this is a lovely thing to wake up to on a Saturday morning. SEO North Sydney are #1 in Google search for the much sought after search term, 'SEO Sydney'!

There are only two ways to get on the first page of Google. One, you can pay for it (via Google Pay Per Click), or two, you can get there organically.

The only way to work out how much a click is actually worth, is to ask yourself how much would you have to pay for it (via Pay Per Click) if you weren't getting that click for free on the organic side of the search page? In the case of search terms like SEO and SEO Sydney (which are searches from one of the single most competitive spaces in Australia - because everyone competing for the first page is naturally an SEO expert), the answer to that question is: north of $36 and $38 PER CLICK'.

That's right. If you pay to be on the first page of an SEO or SEO Sydney search via Pay Per Click, every single time someone clicks on your ad it costs you nearly $40!

Anyone who's ever spoken to me in person or on the phone about SEO will have heard me say, "It's a lot easier to take the boat to where the fish are, than to get the fish to come to you". A metaphor that holds true in the Organic Search v PPC debate. Because while PPC is a strategy that can work for your business, Google themselves tell us that 90% of all traffic is organic, with only 10% of the search traffic generated from the PPC side of the page. So given this salient bit of information, if 90% of the people click on the organic search (rather than the paid ads), then logic dictates that getting on the organic side of the search is where 90% of your online marketing budget should go. QED.

And I don't know about you, but if I had to pay $40 every time someone clicked on me via a Google search, I'd go out of business quicker than you can say, "Elvis has left the building!". And besides, why would I want to pay for a click, when I can get an endless supply of free clicks on the organic side of Google's search, simply by implementing Google's Best Practice search methodology? 

Naturally the organic Google search results fluctuate. One day you're SERP (Search Engine Raking Position) #1, the next day you're SERP #3, the day that you're SERP #2, etc. The actual order ultimately isn't the thing that matters. What matters is that you're on the first page consistently (92% of people don't go past the first page of their Google search) and ideally find yourself in the top 3 (where 60.5% of the first page traffic goes). If you are, then the phone will ring and your business will grow.

Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)

*******

Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

Google has today announced that it is rolling out the Panda 4.0 update. While other SEO companies, who try to 'game' the system to get their clients better search results will be negatively impacted by this, SEO North Sydney clients, who are all run on a white hat content mapping strategy, will greatly benefit.

Bring it on I say, bring it on! This has the potential to be HUGE!

**********

Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)

Nice thing to wake up to this morning! Second in the country for the short tail search 'SEO' after Wikipedia (who of course I'm not competing with).

Got to be happy with that, given the thousands of SEO companies who specialise in getting on the first page of Google I’m competing with to be there!

My kung fu be strong!

Cheers 
Brian M

Happy birthday internet, old buddy, old chum! We don't know what we'd do without you!

Yes, today (March 12, 2014) is officially the internet's 25th birthday. In honour of the occasion, Google's home page includes a cake with a “25″ candle on top to remind everyone.

The world wide web, as modern users may know, was founded on March 12, 1989 by (Sir) Tim Burners-Lee. But, though Burner-Lee is credited with 'founding the web', the internet itself can be traced back decades earlier. Right back to 1957 in fact with the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA - later DARPA). Historians love to credit the genesis of this auspicious organisation to President Dwight Eisenhower (who pushed for the creation of ARPA), with the inference being that the 5 star General launched ARPA because he had a burning desire to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge. When in fact the truth is far more mundane - and some might even say, devious. Because while (what came to be known as ARPA) had been bubbling on US university campuses for several years, it had not received any significant funding from Washington. Then, in October 1957, the unthinkable happened. Russia launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. And suddenly, Bible bashing middle-America was confronted with the unsettling knowledge that those damn Ruskies could see EVERYTHING they were doing...from space!

Needless to say, a US President was never going to take this slap in the face, lying down. So Eisenhower pushed through ARPA (which of course was actually a part of the Department of Defense), and so the war for technological supremacy was cranked up a couple more notches.

The creation of ARPA led to a gentleman by the name of Ted Nelson creating Project Xanadu in 1960. And it was Nelson who coined the term ‘Hypertext’ in 1963. Hypertext is contained in hyperlinks (which are known today simply as ‘links’) and is the core component of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is the language of the web as we know it.

Berners-Lee comes into the picture (historically speaking) around 1980 when he came up with the concept of the World Wide Web (as it would become) while working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. During his research Berners-Lee wrote a rudimentary program for storing information using random associations. The program - named 'Enquire' - was only ever intended for his own personal use however, and was never actually published.

Fast forward to March 12, 1989 and Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN seeking to build 'A web of notes with links between them'. And so...the web was born. And now, 25 years later, we all get to wish the Internet a very happy birthday indeed!

In Tim Berners-Lee's own words :

On the 25th birthday of the web, I ask you to join in - to help us imagine and build the future standards for the web, and to press for every country to develop a digital bill of rights to advance a free and open web for everyone. Learn more and speak up for the sort of web we really want with #web25.

Although most people (myself included) utilise the words 'Internet' and “World Wide Web” to mean the exact same thing, they're actually different. Not that it matters too much in the normal line of conversation you understand, but for those anal-retentive or finicky enough to care (and just so I don't get inundated by emails from nerdy undergrads with too much time on their hands and a 24/7 hard on for InternetFactsAreUs), The 'Internet' is a pan Galactic gargle blasting way of connecting a gazillion computers together via the standard Internet protocol TCP/IP suite, while the ‘World Wide Web’ is a system of Hyperlinked documents accessible via the internet. 

All the nerds happy now? Good. Then we can move on...

Let's sign off on this auspicious birthday by reminding ourselves of two very important points. One, without people like Sir Tim Burners-Lee, folks like me would have to get a real job! And as much as I like to think that I'd be a shoe-in for the role of Brad Pitt's on-set body double if I needed to find an alternate career path, I suspect that in reality I might have to look slightly further afield...

And two, let's take a moment to appreciate how RADICALLY DIFFERENT all our lives today would be without the internet as we know it. So different in fact as to be unrecognisable. With a quite staggering 6 billion web searches performed every day, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that for all of us, the internet and the world wide web have become as much a part of our daily lives, as breathing in an out.

**********

Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)

There are literally thousands of algorithmic factors that Google weighs when working out who goes where in a particular search. Trying to get your head around what algorithm affects what outcome is a little like chasing the rainbow looking for a pot of gold. Because by the time you’ve got to where the end of the rainbow was…it has already moved on. Or - in SEO speak - by the time you work out what Google algorithm affects what short or long tail searches you’re trying to rank for in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions), Google up and changes the algorithms* and you’re back to square one.

*Google on average rolls out between 500 to 600 algorithmic updates every year. Or just over one and a half algorithm updates every single day…

However, notwithstanding the continuously changing slings and arrows of outrageous Google fortune, there are some factors that are pretty much constant. How important they are can change (and have changed) over time, but they are still with us so are worth mentioning here. There are many, many others factors of course. And if you want to know the Top 50 Google Ranking Factors (IN ORDER) that Google uses to rank websites, you might wish to book yourself or your staff into our one day SYDNEY SEO TRAINING COURSE (where this, and every other piece of ‘Must Know’ information about Google is revealed IN DETAIL).

1.      Age of the Domain as a Factor in Search Engine Trust.

Age of the domain is important because the older a domain is, the more times the Google spider has crawled it and thus the more it is inherently ‘trusted’ by Google.

Newer websites are at a distinct disadvantage when compared to older websites for just this reason. There are ways to get around this problem (which will be discussed in a different blog entry at a later date), but make no mistake, if your website is still wet behind the ears, Google will know it, and it’s much harder for your site to rank in the SERPs.

Note: despite what you may have read, every page on the web is its own ‘website’, and has its own ‘Trust Value’ in Google’s eyes. So if your site has 1,000 pages, that equates in a very real sense, to 1,000 websites in Google’s eyes. Of course Google knows that all the pages belong to the main TLD (Top Level Domain), but every page is viewed as a separate entity with its own ranking signals as well as a part of the entire domain. Which means that, on rare occasions, a page in a website can actually have a higher PR (Page Rank) than the home page it belongs to (though this is highly unusual, as most links go to a site’s home page).

2.      Page Rank / PR.

Every page on the web has a Page Rank (PR). Page Rank goes from 0 to 10. The higher the Page Rank the more innate trust value that page has in Google’s eyes. Page Rank is an algorithm created by Larry Page, who with Sergey Brin was one of the two co-founders of Google in 1997 / 1998. Page Rank is not only a clever play on Larry’s surname, but is an algorithm that exists to rank websites based on the trust value given to that site’s content, by other websites.

In times past Page Rank was the huge elephant in the room in Search Engine Optimisation and played a major factor in where you ranked in the SERPs. How could it not as it was the very algorithm that changed the landscape of search as we know it (for everyone – including Yahoo and what we now know as Bing). As such the Page Rank algorithm would update every 3 months or so because of it. But in the last few years Google has been downplaying Page Rank, at least publicly. They don’t offer a Page Rank toolbar for Chrome and they stopped supporting the Page Rank Toolbar for Firefox back in 2011, which many in the SEO community took to mean the death of Page Rank.

Indeed, as far back as 2009, Google’s Amit Singal said in a Bloomberg Interview:

“No one should feel, if I dismantle the current search system, someone will get upset. That’s the wrong environment. When I came, I dismantled [Google cofounders] Larry and Sergey’s whole ranking system. That was the whole idea. I just said, That’s how I think it should be done, and Sergey said, Great!”

However reports of the demise of Page Rank have been vastly overstated. Page Rank is still important (for indexing and search reasons) today, and is still the cornerstone of how Google prioritises their search results. It’s just that Google now has (post the Panda and Penguin updates particularly) many hundreds of ranking factors that they use in concert with Page Rank, to work out where a website should appear in the SERPs, and so are much less reliant on the time honoured ‘how many links you have pointing at your website’ metric than they were back in the day.

3.      On-Page SEO Factors.

On page factors are vitally important in ranking a website, with the quality of the written content, post Panda, being the single most important factor in search today.

Other on-page factors such as how fast a page loads, meta tags and description, et al, combine to give Google an idea of the quality and relevancy of your website’s content. But now, in 2014, it all starts with HOW WELL THE CONTENT IS WRITTEN.

Which, let’s face it, is exactly how it should be. Because Google search is ultimately only interested in two things: 1) relevancy of the content to the search, and 2) the quality of the content itself. Everything else is window dressing to put those two factors together.

4.      Off-Page SEO Factors.

Off page factors such as the type of links, number of links, anchor text, etc are less important now than they were before Google released the Penguin and Panda algorithms. But make no mistake they’re still very important. Though if the current trend toward content being king, continues (as I assure you it will), Google will, over time I believe, phase out their reliance on links all together*.

*And it’s only at THIS point that Page Rank will be retired.

In 2014 however a targeted (rather than an aggressive) off-page strategy is still vital to a website getting on the first page of Google.

Think of it this way, if you put up a new website Google says, ‘The only people who think the content on this website is any good, are the people who put it there’, so Google is more or less ‘Content Neutral’ at the time the website is launched. But when other websites (that Google trusts) link to a page on your website, then you receive a tacit endorsement of the quality of your content (on that page) by a third party. And the more third party websites that give your content the ‘thumbs up’ via a link, and the more relevant that third party is to what you do and where you are, the higher up the search rankings that particular page goes.

Note: whatever you do though, do NOT hire an SEO company in India (or similar) or an SEO company in Australia who outsources link building to India (ASK THIS QUESTION!). Because one in three calls SEO North Sydney gets each day, is from a business whose website is suffering from a Penguin penalty (either algorithmic or manual) due to toxic links. And ‘recovering’ a site from toxic links is an expensive and time consuming process, with no guaranteed end result.* Many clients in fact choose to dump their old domain completely when they get a penguin penalty because it will cost too much and take too long to fix, and thus are forced to start again from scratch. And as I’ve mentioned above, new sites have no innate trust value in Google’s eyes, so a company doing this finds themselves back to square one due to being forced to pick the lesser of two evils.

*it can take anywhere between 3 and 9 months for a site to recover from a Penguin penalty on average.

5.      Number of Pages in Relation to Search Engine Optimization.

Post the Panda algorithm, this is more important than ever. It's what I dubbed, 'The Wikipedia Principle'. Because the more pages you have, and the greater the depth of knowledge you express on a given topic, the more likely Google will think you're an 'authority' on the subject you're discussing.  But don’t think that having hundreds of pages by and of itself will rank your site. Because, due to Google’s Panda algorithm now being able to use a sub-section of Machine Learning known as Support Vector Networks to gauge the quality of a site’s content and practically read the page like a human being (it can now literally tell great content from good content and good content from bad content), if you’ve just got dozens or hundreds of pages of poorly written or duplicate or ‘thin’ content on your website, having more pages will actually harm your site’s performance in the SERPs not help it. But if you want to rank for something, having more ‘supporting pages’ on a given topic and then using those supporting pages cleverly in your IA (Information Architecture) allows you to push page rank around your site to the places that need it most. This is known as page rank sculpting, which of late has got a bad rep (due to affiliate marketers and dodgy SEO companies abusing the practice for many years) but when used judiciously, this – plus the additional pages of original, brilliantly written ‘supporting’ content - can help you enormously. But again, done incorrectly, or by the untrained, this too can damage your site more than help it. But in the hands of trained (and ethical) SEO professionals like SEO North Sydney, this technique can produce exceptional results and a great deal of ‘quick wins’ in the SERPs.

**********

Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)