Ben Richardson - March 2005
Many people are under the impression that if they create a web site with a catchy name, millions of people are going to flood to their site from search engines, mainly Google. Unfortunately this dream usually gets shattered pretty quickly when they realise their site is nowhere to be seen when they search Google. But why? My site rules, I should be number 1!
The best way to understand why you aren't getting the results from Google that you're after is to understand a little about how the search engine works.
At the heart of Google software is a system called PageRank, which basically gives every site on the Internet a rank from 0-10. So how is this calculated? Well, the page rank of your site is determined by the links to your web site. Each time somebody adds a link to your web site, Google interprets this as a vote for your site. The more links you have to your site, the more votes you get.
But Google also looks a little deeper than just sheer volume of links, and analyses the importance of the web site that has cast a vote for your site. Sites that Google determines are important are those with a higher PageRank. So a link to you from a site with a PageRank of 6 is better than a link from a site with a PageRank of 3. In fact, 1 link from a site with a PageRank of 6 is better than 10 links from PageRank 3 sites[1].
Still following? Almost there. When Google is determining how important the link to your site is, it also checks how many other links are on the web page. Take our PageRank 6 page for example. If it has 1000 links on a page, with your site being one of them, Google will determine that the site's 'vote' for your web site is only worth 1/1000 of the PageRank 6 value. If there were only 3 other links on that page their 'vote' for your site will be interpreted by Google as much more important.
OK, so now that you understand how PageRank works, your probably wondering what the PageRank of your site is. Luckily Google has provided us with an easy way to find this out through their Google Toolbar. Once you have installed the toolbar, you will be able to see that PageRank of the page you are currently viewing, so just go to your homepage to see what PageRank you have.
You might also want to find out what sites are linking to you, and Google also provides a simple way to find this information - just search Google for your web address prefixed with 'link:'. For example, here is a list of pages that link to Switch I.T.
Now that you're armed with this knowledge you can look at improving your PageRank, which in turn will improve your search results. Do you have any sites that link to you? Do these sites have a decent PageRank? Is your link on a page with thousands of others?
Improving your PageRank isn't easy - how are you going to get other, more popular web sites to link to you? The most effective method is to not get too caught up in PageRank, but instead focus on offering great content on your web site. And if your site does have interesting and regularly updated content, other sites are going to want to link to you, and you know what that's going to do to your PageRank!
We've covered the basics of Google and PageRank, but if you would like more information on how you can improve your search engine results contact the Switch I.T. team.
[1] This is a guess for illustration purposes and may not be completely correct. This chart gives a more detailed estimate of how much each page rank is worth.