I-Marketer Blog and Newsletter

Mike from Alberta writes:

“I am trying to start a business from home and as I study I keep reading about Google page rank.  What is Google page rank?  It seems everyone talks about how important it is, but I can’t find a clear explanation of what it is and how it works.  Thanks.”

Dear Mike,

It takes guts to start a business from home!  Good for you.  I know it can be tough when there are terms floating around that everyone seems to understand but you.  Let me see if I can help clear this up for you.

Spend any time talking about search engine position and you will eventually come across the phrase “Google Page Rank” or just “PR”.    For many it is one of the most  confusing terms around.

I’m about to shock some of you.  Ready?  Here goes:

GOOGLE DOES NOT RANK WEBSITES

Are you shocked?  Here’s why:  Google doesn’t rank sites, Google ranks individual pages within a site.

All-In-One-Business.com has somewhere around 2,500 individual pages.  Some of those pages are completely internal—meaning they are used by me and my staff internally and are not available to the public.  Some of those pages are available only to customers for certain products.  Some of those pages are available to the general public.

Google has “indexed” those public pages on my site—as of today they have 584.

When anyone anywhere in the world types in any search term, Google looks at all the pages in their index—including mine—to pull out any individual pages relevant to the search phrase.

So for one search phrase I may have a page that is number 1 on Google.  But for another search phrase I may not have ANY pages showing up.  I may have one page that shows up #1 for one search phrase and #25 for a slightly different search phrase.

That’s because Google doesn’t rank websites, Google ranks all of the individual pages within a website.

Got it so far?  Good.  Now it begins to get complicated.

Most people in the world assume Google ranks the pages in the search engine result pages (or SERPs) according to the particular keywords actually ON the page.  The “perfect” page scoring #1 and next most perfect page #2, etc.

The reality is much smarter—and more complicated.

Google looks at two types of data to determine where to rank a page on your site in its SERPs.

First, Google looks at ON PAGE factors.  On page factors are all things you, as the website owner, control.  These include the title of the page, the headlines on the page, the page content and a thing called “keyword density” (don’t worry about these yet—we’ll cover it in a later lesson.)

The biggest factors Google uses are not even on your page—or even on your site.  The biggest factors Google uses to determine what your page is about are called OFF PAGE factors.

Off page factors include:  The number of other web pages that link to your page (called back links), the importance of those pages (called Page Rank), the subject content of those pages and the linking text those pages use to link to yours.

Back links are simply links from someone else’s page to your page.   Pretty simple.

Page rank is a little more complex.

Page rank is a number from 0 to 10 which Google assigns to every page it spiders.  To Google the page rank determines how “important” an individual page is compared to other pages on the web.

The higher the number the more important Google sees the page.  Page rank 10 pages are the most important, page rank 0 pages are the least important.

Important note:  “Page Rank” is often a misunderstood term since we often use the word “Rank” to refer to how a page comes up in the search results.  Often people think a page rank 10 page will be in the number 10 position in the search results, a page rank 8 will be in the 8th position and so on.  Page rank is not the order a page will show up in the search results!

A good way to think of page rank and importance is to view each page as having a certain number of “votes” to give to another website.  When a high page rank page like CNN.com (page rank 9) links to a web page, Google sees CNN’s “vote” as much more important than a link from a site like my SeminarBonuses.com website with a page rank of zero.

How much more important is a “vote” from a high page rank page?

Each page rank number is worth roughly eight times the number below it, meaning a link from a PR 2 page is viewed by Google as important as 8 PR 1 pages.  PR 3 links are worth 8 PR 2 or 64 PR 1 (8 x 8).

A PR 7 link is worth:

8 PR 6 Links
64 PR 5 Links (8 x
512 PR 4 Links (8 x 8 x
4096 PR 3 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x
32,768 PR 2 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x
262,144 PR 1 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x

While this is somewhat of an oversimplification, it will serve to help us find niches we can easily dominate.

You want to have as many “votes” as possible from other web pages as possible.  You can get thousands and thousands of PR 1 and PR 2 pages or you can get a few PR 5, PR 6 and PR 7 pages.

Obviously a small number of higher page rank pages are much easier to get and maintain than a huge number of lower PR pages.

So if you have a web page all about cultivating elm trees and want to score highly for the term “cultivating elm trees” then ideally you want many high page rank pages about elm trees on other sites to link back to your page with the term “cultivating elm trees” in the linking text.

Now that you understand how Google ranks pages, you can put that knowledge to work to get top search listings for YOUR pages.
 

Here’s Some Dating Advice for Women:  If you want to grab a man’s attention, first make sure you’re his “type.”  In most cases he will make an almost instant decision from your appearance whether he wants to “get to know you better” or not.

Does he like brunettes?  Make sure you are a brunette.  Blonds? Ditto.

Voluptuous or athletic?  Earthy or high maintenance? Brainy or bubbly? Long hair or short?

The bottom line is this:  Ask almost every man what “type” of woman he likes and he can tell you.

What does this have to do with a successful start of a business at home?

Simple: Google’s a lot like a single guy on the prowl.

If you could ask Google what “he” likes in a website, you would find out:

Google prefers larger websites over smaller.  (“I like big sites and I cannot lie…”)

Google prefers websites where the content is based on a central theme.

Google likes website that are linked to by other websites in the same general market.

Google likes websites with relevant content for its users.

But how can you build a website with 5,000 relevant, genuine content pages?
For the last couple years people have been “hyping” directory generator sites.  (You’ve probably heard of programs like Traffic Equalizer or Search Engine Cloaker used to generate these types of sites.)

To create these sites, you would generate a list of keyword phrases you wanted to score highly for (sometimes numbering in the thousands) then plug that keyword list into the program.

The program then turns out a site full of “fluff” content and/or “scraped” directory info designed to please the search engines and get you to a top spot for those keywords.

The only problem is this:  Once Google began seeing these sites, Google began creating algorithms to keep them out of the results.

Want to know how YOU can build that 5,000 page site Google will love?

Well, starting now, you can create 3 pages per day for the next 5 years.

Or you can admit you CAN’T build a 5,000 page site—but you can have other people build it for you—and they’ll do it for free.

By using a content management system you can have other people create solid, keyword rich, Google appealing content to your site.  In some cases you can have those 5,000 pages in a matter of weeks—without fear of Google blacklisting you.

What is a Content Management System?

The shortest definition of a content management system (CMS) is this:

“A content management system is a website interface allowing the user to easily upload and edit website content.”

With a CMS you don’t need a webmaster nor a computer science degree to add or modify your website’s content—it allows you to make changes to your site as easily as using a word processor.  Or pretty close.

There are a bunch of types of content management systems available today.  You can get your own CMS here:

http://www.TrafficWriting.com

Blogs are one of the most common types of CMS and are available for free from sites like http://www.Blogger.com.   Blogger hosts the sites for its users and is a “one stop shop,” though it is a little limiting.

Forums are another type of content management system—once installed users can easily add content to a website in the form of “posts.”  There are a ton of forums online for almost every topic.

There are also tools like http://www.WordPress.com that allow users to easily add content to a website.  Once installed on your own website, WordPress allows you and others to create messages, automatically adding them to your website.

You Need a Content Management System

While all have their pluses and minuses, you need to be utilizing a CMS as part of your search engine strategy.  None of us has the time, knowledge and/or motivation to go out and “write” a mega-site.  A CMS will allow hundreds or even thousands of visitors to create the site for you—all the while putting up highly relevant content Google and the other search engines will love.

It’s a win-win situation.

As you start a business from home you will find out pretty quickly there are several technical “tricks” that can help you be successful.

One of those “tricks” is to be able to create a redirect from your site to another site.

What is a redirect?  Put simply a redirect is a page on a website the “redirects” the visitor to a different page.  Here are some cases where you would use a redirect:

1. You can use a redirect to send people from your website to an affiliate website.

This is how I send people to my affiliate vendors—I use a redirect.   Go ahead and look at the links here:  http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/rec-rec  each one is a redirect.

Why use them?  Here are just a few of the advantages:

• If your affiliate link ever changes, you just make one change and all of the links are changed.
• They are easier to remember.
• Your visitor doesn’t know he is necessarily visiting an affiliate link.

2. You can use a redirect to take people from an “old” page location to a new one.

From time to time you will have a webpage that you have replaced or updated.  By putting a “redirect page” where the old one used to be, you can automatically take people to the new page.

3. You can use a redirect to “track” visitors.

As you run your site you will want to see where your visitors are coming from.  By using a redirect page you can assign a particular “page” to one ad, and then redirect them from that page to the sales page or other content page you wish for them to see.  Then, by looking at your server logs, you can see how many “hits” your redirect page received to determine how many “click throughs” that ad produced.

For example I use this page:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/QB

to track the traffic going to a particular offer I was making.  When you click on it you will see an example of the FOURTH use of a redirect page:

4. You can use a redirect to send people from an expired offer to a current one.

A few times a year I have an offer that expires.  Once it expires I need a way to send people to a different offer that is still valid.  I use a redirect to accomplish this.

As you can see there are many ways to use a redirect page.  Here is a step-by-step plan for creating one on your site.

Step One:  Download the redirect script here:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/redirectscript

Step Two:  Open your redirect script with Notepad.

Step Three:  Find the two lines in the script where it says http://www.TargetURL.com and replace the http://www.TargetURL.com with your own URL.

Step Four:  Save the file with the page name you wish to use.

For example:  If you want the page on your site to be named “affiliate.html” then you would save the new file as “affiliate.html”

Step Five: Upload to your website and test.

That’s it!  You just created a redirect on your website.

If you want to learn how to start a business from home you need to begin by understanding what is possible in starting a business online.

For most people, this is pretty tough.  They have seen the hype: “Make $10,000 overnight,” “Retire next week,” “$1,000 a day just returning phone calls.”

Guess what folks? It ain’t that easy.

I discourage my students from setting up these kinds of goals.  It’s like being a 250 lb couch potato and deciding you will run a marathon in 30 days—it’s just not reasobale.  Often these almost impossible goals leave you frustrated and ready to give up on online business.

So let’s look at a reality:

It will take most people at least 18 months of consistent, part-time effort to reach the $10,000 per month level.

But consider this…

To start an offline business and generate a profit of $10,000 per month typically requires an investment of $100,000 into storefront, inventory, advertising and operating capital.   In most cases it takes an offline business 5 years to generate a PROFIT, let alone a profit over 6-figures per year.

You can do it much faster, much cheaper online.

So what’s reasonable for someone just starting a business online?  Here are some goals you can attain even if you have never done anything like this before:

Month One:  

Complete market research and have a product and website completed and ready to sell.

Month Two:

Make 10 sales of your product or service.

Month Three:

$1,000 in gross income.

Month Four:

$2,000 in gross income.

Month Six:

$4,000 in gross income—at least $1,500 profit.

Month Nine:

$8,000 in gross income—at least $3,000 profit.

Month Twelve:

$10,000 in gross income—at least $4,000 profit.

While this isn’t setting any records, these are workable goals.  Things the average person can achieve in starting a new business online.  Business that is sustainable.  Online business that can grow.

How to start an online business—begin with reachable, encouraging goals.

For more information on setting reasonable goals I have this online resource you can download.  When you download this free resource you will be amazed how simple the process can be:

http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/getdirection