seoforsmallbiz.com

Oh dear small business owners who love to Google SEO topics and email me questions… I applaud your efforts….

I received and email asking me about page rank, and I will make it short and simple… Page rank is an indicator from Google on how authoritative they believe a given page is. That is it.

It doesn’t guarantee you higher ranks on search engine results (although it definitely doe not hurt!) You can see your page rank by downloading the googletool bar and going to each page on your site. You will see that no page will have a rnak higher than the home page, and that is because of the distribution of your link juice over to your subsequent pages. So PR is not for a site but it is for a page. You should know your PR - but do not need to loose sleep over it. Concentrate in getting relevant links to your pages, and make sure your pages have fresh, unique, relevant content, and you will be just fine…

I sometimes come across wonderful businessmen, who had taken so much time and effort in deveoping their sites, so nice an structured -the wrong way- for  bot.

Bots in reality are not smart entities.  They work very hard, and the read a lot, but they do not “think”, and they do not look at a web page like we do.  So every thing we can do to make it easier for a bot to read our pages is a good thing.  (Oh, by the way, stay away from flash and fancy technologies that make it very hard (if not impossible) for the bots to read your pages)

Your site architecture is very important to the way a bot reads your site.  A bot wants to read its content, see the page title, and  see how you labeled things so it can determine its relevancy for  a given search term.  Now lets assume that your home page is a parent, and each link to an internal page is its child.  And a child could have its own child, and it can go on like that for ever - in theory.  In my opinion, sites that are shallow and wide get better spidered than tall and skinny ones!

Think about it as your file drawer,  you have 3-4 drawers, and then a bunch of folders inside.  Your site should be designed the same way.  This will let the bot decide on how your page flows, and get to the content faster.  Trust me, no one wants to go through 20 navigational clicks to get to a valve or a shoe.  3 or 4 clicks from the home page to your product detail page is ideal. 

Keep it there, and you’ll make your happy…