Jochen Burkhard's List: SEO

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

By now the entire world has been alerted to the fact the Google algorithm and its companion robots are roving around the web re-indexing and prioritizing all websites it comes across.

What does this mean to you? As I understand it the Google universe is sick and tired of awful commercial-laden websites with no intrinsic value. These days it’s all too common that scam, spam, and phishing sites outrank thoughtful informative sites that have something to offer.

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated. PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tutorials enable web developers to optimize their websites for the search engines.

In the previous installment of this series, we pointed out that even a well-designed, high-tech website is useless without content. But even a great website with great content is useless if nobody knows about it, and that's why one of the main goals of any web developer is to own the top spot in the search engines - to be the first result when you search for the keywords associated with your site.

Last week we showed you how to determine what your site's focus is, which keywords you will be using and how to effectively create titles. In this session, we will teach you how to use those keywords within your site's content, how to effectively use links and tags, and why your site's navigation should be carefully considered for SEO.

"When it comes to SEO, there are certain elements that need to be in place for any newly-designed or updated website. Have 301 redirects been put into place? Is the robots.txt file authored to allow adequate crawling? This infographic depicts a handy checklist that will help get you through any new site launch or transition."

There was a time way back in this author's career when making web sites as fast as possible was almost as high a priority as making them look good. In today's Internet, the mantra is to make a web site as flashy as possible. As designers and developers, we tend to forget that there are a lot of people out there that still use dial-up or browse on slow Internet connections. It is easy to sit at home or work on a broadband connection and not worry about speed, but try going to a location that has slow connections or browse on a phone or portable device and you can quickly get impatient.

"The SEOmoz toolset includes over twenty SEO tools designed to help with every aspect of search engine optimization, including on-page targeting, site crawlability, competitive analysis, rank checking and keyword difficulty."