SEO And Dissemination Of Google PR

I read a great post from Cody regarding SEO tips recently. I don’t agree with every point – in my experience it makes no difference how far up the code block your content is for example – and there’s a couple he missed – notably the importance of submitting your site to the major directories – but its still a great list.

Something thats rarely touched on outside of dedicated SEO communities is the best way to get a good Google PR structure for your site. Its not as simple as get a good PR on the home page. In fact sometimes that can be counter-productive.

What Is PR?

Google’s PageRank (PR) technology is a mark of importance that Google attach to a particular page. Allegedly. There is a significant school of thought that claim PR is useless as a measurement of the success of a site in Google and yet another school of thought think that it was once used seriously by the Google search algorithm but since the Autumn 2003 ‘Florida’ event, Google have been using it less and less and some even suspect its used as a double-blind technique to make SEO black-hatters (those who use dodgy SEO techniques) falsely optomise their pages for PR.

Personally, I think its all about site structure and that PR isn’t so much part of Google’s seach algorithm but more a mark of how well you are doing _in_ that algorithm.

The Trick

Not really a trick – nothing ever is in good SEO – but more a long hard slog to get the right balance. Its very difficult originally but once you get the idea behind it and put in the donkey work you start to see some real results.

Think of a web forum – any web forum, the subject is irrelevant – look at the structure of it. How a web forum builds its structure should be how you are aiming to get a good site balance that will give you a good, well disseminated PR thats passed through to every page of your site.

A forum is tiered. Every seperate tier ‘drills down’ to a more concentrated and specialised area of the forum. Lets take a web forum about cookery for example. Teir one (or level one if you prefer that terminology) is simply ‘cookery’.

Tier two breaks that down into slightly more targetted areas – say, ‘utensils’, ‘cooks’ and ‘recipies’ for tier two headings.

Tier three goes into even greater targetted areas. Tier three of the second tier about ‘recipies’ for example might be ‘french recipies’, ‘spanish recipies’, ‘italian recipies’ etc etc you get the idea. Tier four of each of these tier three areas are your ‘money’ pages.

Lets go back to tier one and demonstrate how we use keywords throughout these levels. On tier one, the keywords are very generic and concentrate _solely_ on the idea of cookery. You don’t make _any mention_ of the keywords you’ll be using on tiers two/three/four/etc (depending on how ‘deep’ your site structure is). Everything on tier one is fairly generic regarding cookery.

Tier two is again fairly generic about the seperate categories you have here and your keywords should make brief mention of tier one but should be weighted for keywords regarding tier two but again, make no mention of any tiers _below_ this level.

Tier three’s keywords make very brief reference to tier one, a decent reference to tier two but are very specific to tier three. Once more – no mention of any tiers below this one should be made.

OK, I’ve designated tier four as our ‘money’ pages – this is as far as my hypothetical cookery site content actually drills to. So this page can mention tier one in passing, make brief reference to tier two, brief reference to tier three but really go to town on this (its own) tier. This is where you start heavy (but not too heavy) mentions of your three and four keyword phrases. Make your pages as readable as possible for humans – _all_ humans – by which I mean make your site as accessible as you can. An accessible site always ranks better as it is readble by both humans and machines alike. If your pages are easily viewable and navigable with styles turned off (or in Lynx) then you’re definitely on the right tracks.

So the goal with your keywords/phrases is to make them more and more specific on each level. Tier one concentrates on a very broad subject and tier four deals with very specific areas within that subject. Tier one should concentrate on one, possibly two generic keywords and tier four should make use of four or five very targetted two/three word keyphrases.

Doing this properly should result (eventually) in a PR of 2, 3 or 4 on your home page and as you get more relevant anywhere between 6-8 on your heavily targetted tier four pages. These tier four pages are where you should aim to get all your backlinks pointing to (a backlink is exactly as it sounds – a link back to you. Please note: a backlink is _not_ the same as a link exchange which won’t get you as good rewards). Depending on your market (and some markets can take a very long time) if your tier four pages get a lot of high quality backlinks then your PR on these pages can get up to the 8-9 level.

Another thing to note – the PR level in the Google toolbar frequently differs from the real PR. For a more accurate picture of your PR, try and find your site in the Google directory. If its not there you need to submit your site to DMOZ as soon as possible as it can take a *long* time to get a site accepted in DMOZ. A site I submitted in Jan 2004 still isn’t listed today for example. Obviously this entirely depends on how busy your category is but don’t leave this standing – sort it out as soon as you can.