In this blog, we will be focusing more on understanding different kinds of ranking in SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization.

If you are new to SEO, I  will recommend to have a high level walk-through on improve website SEO.

Get your page rank high in Google

Links (Hyperlinks) are very essential in every website. They help visitors to reach to right information. If you don’t have proper links to your page or website that is, links that convince search engine valuable, your page can’t be ranked high in Google search results.

You have to invest good amount of time on building links which is one of the most critical component in successful SEO.

What makes links so important?

• Links help search engine to find your site
• The more links point to your site more often they spend on your site. The way to get your website indexed is to follow the links to it.
• The site with no links pointing to it will be in trouble and it will may never be indexed.
• A link is good, but links with keyword is far more better. Keywords in the link’s text tell the search engine the context about the page. If you don’t have good keyword link, thus your rank will be impacted.

Link Popularity is the way to calculate popularity of the webpage based on the number of links pointing to it. That is number of ways to reach to that webpage. The more links pointing to your website, search engines will treat it as higher page value and the higher your pages will rank in the search results.

How to know the popularity of my webpage?

There are number online tools available to know not only the website popularity but also in depth analysis of your website pages.

• http://linkpopularity.com
• http://checkyourlinkpopularity.com
• http://mos.com/researchtools

We are in the era where digital is disrupting every business. Search engines are now a days quite advance and powered with very complex AI algorithms to mine right webpaages. So just having basic page popularity will not going to help.

Google uses following ranking mechanism on top of link popularity.

1. PageRank
2. Pseudo PageRank
3. TrustRank

PageRank

Google uses Page rank, an advance link-popularity algorithm, uses to assign a value to a webpage

Apart from the higher links which are pointing to your pages (Page Popularity), Google also check the page rank for the pages on those links sit.

This means link from high PageRank page is worth more than links from lower PageRank page.

Each link on a page acts a vote or collection of vote, the more links means more votes. However fewer links from higher PageRank pages carry more votes.

In summary, PageRank is based on

• Number of Links
• PageRank of originating pages
• Number of links on Originating pages
• The linking page “votes” for the linked-to-pages

PageRank is passed from page to page and not site to site.

If query terms are matched exactly same for 2 pages, Google will consider PageRank for the pages to decide which page should be higher in the search results because worldwide web has voted for that page.

Pseudo PageRank

Earlier Google used to publishes PageRank number of the pages in search result. Unfortunately it is no longer doing that now.

So how do we determine whether a link from Site ABC is better that Site XYZ?

To fill this gap from google, few online tools are now provide Pseudo page ranks.

1. Majestic.com : Citation Flow (PageRank) / Trust Flow (TrustRank)
2. Moz.com : Page Authority
3. Ahrefs.com : URL rating

This doesn’t mean it will exactly work the same way as Google’s PageRank (which anyway Google also doesn’t provide) but it gives a measure closer to that.

TrustRank

A highly trusted website when links to another site, it’s very likely a site being linked to can be a trusted website.

What are the Trusted Websites?

TrustRank process starts with hand-picked collection of websites such as, newspapers, universities, government sites, radio and TV etc..

All these sites are chosen carefully after reviewed by search engine employees and then given Highest Trust Rating. So links from these sites will be more valuable than links from some other blog sites.

So e.g. We started from Trusted Site, let say Times of India, any link from it to another site may assumed to be trustworthy. So link pass on some trust.

Now this site also has some links pointing to other sites and hence TrustRank is passed on to other site but this time TrustRank value will be lesser than the earlier one.

Trusted Sites pass on TrustRank, which gets reduced as a distance from the trusted site increases.

Links from trustworthy sites help your site rank well as they will carry more value than links from non Trustworthy sites.

Considerations while creating the links for website

We have discussed about the importance of links and how google find out and sort the links based on their importance. Finally below are the few points which should be considered before we create the links for website.

• Use good keyword in anchor text (the text that is visible to the visitor). The text user will read and click on. This will improve your SEO to rank well in the search engine.
• When getting links from other sites to your sites, you need to aware rel=”nofollow” attribute. This tells the search engine not to follow the link. Please avoid this when possible.
• Always use image file name with keywords in them. Also put alt attribute in image tag with keywords.
• Title attribute provides additional information about link such as tool tip. However it may probably not much important from SEO perspective, at least not with Google.

That’s all for now!