I would like to give you a few thoughts to think about, maybe something that, up until now, has not been a big part of your internet marketing toolbox. Perhaps you are just now embarking on your maiden voyage to the vast seas of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or perhaps you are an old sea dog, and you’ve been around the horn a few times and there’s absolutely nothing new about SEO to learn. Or, maybe you’re already tired of my sea-going metaphors and just want to move on the Zen of SEO!
The basis of measurement success is of course the Google Page Rank (PR). New sites start off with a PR of zero and, depending on all sorts of criteria, may stay at zero for what seems like forever. At the other end of the scale is a page rank of ten, of which very few sites achieve, unless you are one of the huge directory sites like Google or Yahoo. Even PR’s of eight and nine are illusive and out of reach of the most average businesses. So it is that area between PR four and PR seven where one finds their website getting potential visitors in the amount of thousands per day. Don’t get me wrong, even a PR of two or three is good, and you can congratulate yourself for achieving this; but the road to internet success is found in the area of PR four and above.
As with anything, there is more than one way to accomplish something. And with attaining a high Google PR, there are plenty of ways to try to trick the Google search spiders to give your site a higher PR. Sometimes you can attain a very high PR this way. These techniques include link farms, spamdexing, etc. This process is referred to as black hat techniques. On the other hand, white hat techniques utilize legitimate, organic search engine optimization.
As you move forward with your own SEO endeavors, it is probably best to make your choice of which methodology you want to use right off the bat. Will you choose a potentially quick rise to a high PR using any method possible? Or do you choose staying within the confines of what is ethical and falls within the specified Google SEO parameters? If your decision is to play on the dark side, be forewarned that if caught, Google will not think twice before taking your lofty PR five, six, or seven right back down to zero. In fact, you could face not getting indexed on Google at all.
With all that said, let’s assume you would like to take the white hat road to PR SEO. It may be more time consuming and take a little more work, but you’ll ultimately be doing something quite nice for yourself, your visitors and customers, and the web in general. And you’ll be providing something of value. Finally, the foundation of what you are building (your website) will ultimately be stronger and much longer lasting.
I’m going to share with you my personal plan for optimizing one of my own new website over the next six months to a year. That’s right, it may be a year before you will see the fruits of your hard labor. But if you want success with SEO and marketing your website, the kind of success that means 5,000, 10,000 or even 15,000 visitors each day, then just know it will be worth it. An interesting thing that I’ve learned, and this is really very helpful, is that giving yourself an expanded, slowed down timetable for your website’s SEO (like one year), will help you keep the proper perspective and maintain the patience you will need to not just give up. Google works at their own speed and cannot be rushed too quickly (if you stay with the white hat approach). Just know that if you have recently launched your site and are sitting at PR zero, you need to give yourself several months before you typically will see any kind of jump at all. Also know that Google will hold back making public a new site’s actual PR (one showing zero) for up to several months to keep the playing field fair. In their view, having a brand new site jump to PR five, would be more problematic in the long run. So take heart that your site may in fact be climbing in page rank far before you actually see the results. Once you do start seeing movement, continue being patient.
