Clearing up some things about PR and SERP ranking

It's been said over and over and over again that the PR of your own site doesn't affect it's position in the SERPs, and yet I still come across people talking about how important PR is for your site.

Since this topic still seems to be so misunderstood, let me give a short explanation of why the PR of your page doesn't matter for ranking in the SERP.

The only reason PR matters for your own site is if you're going to sell advertising space on your site or you plan to sell your site. Those are the only reasons you need to be concerned with the PR of your own pages.


For ranking in the SERPs, the PR of your own page doesn't matter, but the PR of pages you get backlinks from does.
Here's why:

PR is based on the total backlinks a page is getting, but the SERP position is based on how well your site ranks for a particular keyword.

So lets say your website "somedomain.com" has the following backlinks to it:
10,000 for "keyword 1"
10,000 for "keyword 2"
10,000 for "keyword 3"
10,000 for "keyword 4"
10,000 for "keyword 5"

Now the PR will be based on the total 50,000 backlinks, but it's position in the serp for any particular keyword will still be only 10,000 backlinks.

If you create another 50,000 backlinks for "keyword 6" then there will be a postive effect on the PR of the site, which now has a total 100,000 backlinks. But it won't affect it's position in the SERP for keywords 1 thru 5, (although "keyword 6" will now be ranking based on the new 50,000 links).

So that's why the PR of your own site doesn't matter as far as ranking in the SERPs.


But what about the PR of sites you get backlinks from?

Well, higher PR sites carry a little more weight than low PR sites. Lets say that for "keyword 1" you focused on high PR sites to get those backlinks. Now (depending on how many and how high the PR) those 10,000 backlinks on high PR sites will count the same as if you had gotten 30,000 backlinks on low PR sites. So by getting a lot of high PR sites backlinking for "keyword 1", your sites position in the SERP will be improved for that keyword.

To sum it up in short:

• A page's PR is based on the total amount and quality of all it's backlinks.
• A page's SERP position is based only on the backlinks targeting a keyword.

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8 Great On-Page SEO Techniques

In today’s post we will be looking specifically at On-Page SEO and some of the most effective ways to increase your page rankings on search engines.

On-Page Search Engine Optimisation

1. Page Titles

Your page titles are one of the most important SEO factors on your site. Each of your pages & posts should have its own unique title, which includes the main keywords for that page.

For example, you could write a blog post about a new chocolate cake recipe that you have tried. It is therefore vitally important that you include ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ within your post title, perhaps “Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe” or “ Chocolate Cake Recipe for kids”, etc.

This way, whenever someone searches for Chocolate Cake Recipes in a search engine, your post has a better chance of showing up because you have included those keywords.

2. Meta Descriptions

Many people forget to include meta descriptions for their pages. These descriptions are an important place to include relevant keywords for your content, as these are used within the search results when your page is listed.

For instance, if we continue to use the ‘Chocolate Cake Recipe’ example, then a good meta description for that page would include those keywords and related ones. So, “This easy chocolate cake recipe is possibly the most delicious, mouth watering, chocolatey cake ever made.” would be a great meta description to use, as it is relatively short, whilst containing a number of specific keywords.

3. Meta Tags

For each of your pages, you can include a set of keywords in the form of meta tags. These should be all the relevant keywords of your content, which you will have researched previously.

I use a WordPress plug-in on my sites called ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This allows me to enter all of my meta tag keywords, meta description and page title at the bottom of each of my posts before publishing. This simply inserts all of the information into your page HTML format for you, making your life a little easier.

4. URL Structure

Including search engine friendly URLs for each of your pages is highly recommended, as these bring better crawling. Shorter URLs seem to perform better in search engine results, however that is not the only factor.

URLs that include targeted keywords, also perform better. The location of these keywords can also be a major influence. For example site.com/keyword would perform better than site.com/365/738/subfolder/keyword etc.

5. Body Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)

When writing your articles, you should break up your content into smaller sections & paragraphs to make it easier for people to read. These sections can be given heading, which is where H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags are used.

Generally H1 tags are reserved for your main page title, with subsequent headings (just like the ones I have used throughout this post) being issued H2, H3, etc. Search engines use these to determine what is important within your content. This is why keyword rich headines are more useful than generic ones. Make sure you write keyword rich headings in the order of priority in H1, H2 and H3 title tags. They are used by many crawlers to differentiate important content.

6. Keyword Density

Including relevant keywords throughout your content is very important, as it helps search engines work out what your content is about. However, try not to excessively repeat and overuse keywords just for search engine robots. This can lead to your site being banned from search engines.

To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density to roughly 2-5%. If you find this hard, get out a thesaurus and broaden your writing vocabulary. This way, you are still writing about the same thing, without risk of being banned.

7. Image SEO

Using images within your content is a great way to make your site more visually appealing and break up boring chunks of text. You can utilise these images to help improve your site SEO.

All your uploaded images have titles, so treat them just the same as your page titles. Including relevant keywords can help people find your site when searching on Google Images.

You can also include Alt Text and Descriptions for your images, making them even more useful with SEO.

8. Internal Linking

People often think that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links are important, these are not the only important links!

Placing links to your other website pages, is a great way of improving your site and used properly, internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal. Not only does it make it much easier for your visitors to navigate around your site and find all of your content, but it also ensures that your site gets properly crawled allowing the search engines to find all of your pages. It also helps to build the relevancy of a page to relevant keywords and phrases, whilst also helping to increase the Google PageRank of your pages.

There are a number of different methods that you can use to improve your internal linking structure. The main being; content links and permanent navigation links.

For bloggers, content links are very useful when used properly. These are links that are placed within your article posts, which redirect people to other relevant pages on your site. For example, this post is focused on increasing traffic to your site, so readers may also find a post on ‘How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog‘ useful. Perhaps other people are just starting out blogging and want to learn more.

Summary

These 8 techniques are just some of the ways that you can improve your on-page SEO. Any one used independently of the others won’t make much difference to your site ranking, however when used together, they can help to improve your site traffic.
They will help to get your pages working better, they will help to get your entire site crawled by search engine spiders, they will help increase the value of internal pages and they will build the relevancy of internal pages to specific keyword phrases.
So, it pays to spend some time implementing these to improve your site! Please leave your comments below & feel free to ask any questions.

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