For small business website owners who like tracking site performance, the Google PageRank update for Q3 2008 took place over the weekend. Now forums will fill up with PR topics including replies by site owners wondering why their small business website PageRank remains unchanged, or dropped. Some will go up.

Google did a great job 11 months ago sending sites to oblivion who were involved in buying and selling links. Backlinks from other websites are still like votes when done naturally, and a related site linking to your site adds value. However, PageRank is only one factor of seo, or search engine optimization, in determining the success of your website.

Compare expectations with actual performance, and if you convert traffic and are at least modestly satisfied with site performance, my advice is don’t get too hung up on PageRank. Some owners use social networks to boost traffic, yet high traffic is useless without converting visitors into buyers.

A better web design strategy is still my favorite 5-word phrase: “Add original quality content often” as the secret of search engine optimization and to improve the performance of your website design. The words “original” and “quality” within that phrase will get visitor’s attention, and then those plus “Add… content often” will attract search engines. PageRank as well as performance is more likely to deteriorate if you build a site and let it sit without updates or new content.

Like anything, begin your web design with a good foundation as in quality code and content, and then continually improve on both as you apply natural seo strategies, and you should be smiling at future Google PageRank updates. An ongoing annual budget for website revisions will be key in staying ahead of your competition, while launch-and-forget-it web design strategy is bound to fail.