Google PageRank Misconceptions
Small business owners joining the internet with a new website often end up fixated on numbers that are meaningless. As each website owner gains experience, some are eventually drawn into concepts of search engine optimization as they learn new terms like Google PageRank. If you have the Google toolbar for IE or FireFox installed with the pagerank status bar showing current pagerank, mouse over the scale and you may have noticed their "PageRank is Google's measure of the importance of this page" message.
Does that mean your website is unimportant if your pagerank is 1 or 2? Not necessarily.
In a reply to a request for advice a few months back I cautioned a website owner that his site needed a makeover. The first impression is critical to keeping visitors on any website, and having them eventually buy products or services. The text content he had was fine, yet the presentation looked like grade school graphics from 1995 which is inappropriate for a commercial site. Given a choice, most buyers will be drawn to an attractive website design.
In this case study, the person's question involved a recent pagerank drop of his home page from 3 to 2, and he was more worried about that number than his bottom line. His service is local within 100 miles of the location of his business, so he's not looking for worldwide clients. For key phrases that describe his services the website showed up on page one of Google results, so he should have been very happy.
Your small business website's success is not measured in "importance" to visitors other than paying customers. If the small business owner in this scenario had put time and energy into improving the first impression for visitors, more would be inclined to buy rather than click to the next site in the search results. Success online is not about traffic. It is about converting traffic to paying customers, so be careful about being distracted by Google pagerank misconceptions.
Quality content added often will draw and keep both types of visitors... people with money and search engines. You may want to read an article I wrote and published in 2006 entitled My 5 Second Rule for Small Business Owners to understand more about first impressions in print and online.
TAGS: advice small business advice search engine optimization seo google pagerank
Does that mean your website is unimportant if your pagerank is 1 or 2? Not necessarily.
In a reply to a request for advice a few months back I cautioned a website owner that his site needed a makeover. The first impression is critical to keeping visitors on any website, and having them eventually buy products or services. The text content he had was fine, yet the presentation looked like grade school graphics from 1995 which is inappropriate for a commercial site. Given a choice, most buyers will be drawn to an attractive website design.
In this case study, the person's question involved a recent pagerank drop of his home page from 3 to 2, and he was more worried about that number than his bottom line. His service is local within 100 miles of the location of his business, so he's not looking for worldwide clients. For key phrases that describe his services the website showed up on page one of Google results, so he should have been very happy.
Your small business website's success is not measured in "importance" to visitors other than paying customers. If the small business owner in this scenario had put time and energy into improving the first impression for visitors, more would be inclined to buy rather than click to the next site in the search results. Success online is not about traffic. It is about converting traffic to paying customers, so be careful about being distracted by Google pagerank misconceptions.
Quality content added often will draw and keep both types of visitors... people with money and search engines. You may want to read an article I wrote and published in 2006 entitled My 5 Second Rule for Small Business Owners to understand more about first impressions in print and online.
TAGS: advice small business advice search engine optimization seo google pagerank
Jim Degerstrom 
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