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.
