Google Page Rank (PR)

Google is the number one search engine on the world wide web.

It constantly revises its ranking algorithms, so in order for a web site to remain popular with Google, marketing professionals must stay on top of these modifications.

PageRank is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. Its properties are much discussed by search engine optimization (SEO) experts.

The PageRank system is one of the methods that the most successful search engine, Google, uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. It was developed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University in 1998. As Google puts it (http://www.google.com/technology/):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

In other words, a page rank results from a "ballot" amongst all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links").

A page that is linked by many pages with high rank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support of this specific page. The Google Toolbar PageRank goes from 0 to 10. It seems to be a logarithmic scale. The exact details of this scale are unknown.

Truly, it is nearly a full-time job keeping up with their page ranking specifications.

PageRank is all about keeping track or results. Results are important to marketing goals and marketing goals can only be reached with a marketing plan. So add Website PageRank to your plans now.

Budget an hour a week or more for PageRank analysis. Simply plug in your hourly rate and away you go.

Budget: $100 - $350 weekly