SEO and Your Google PR

This post may ruffle some feathers. I will try to keep it short.

I had a conversation with a friend this morning about SEO. I started thinking. Now, you may not know, but one of my favorite pastimes is managing my websites (of which I mentioned in an earlier post). There are many parts to managing these sites…customer service, updates and upgrades, new features and very importantly, SEO.

Basically, SEO is adjusting of website code and content so it consistently appears on the early pages of search results for strong search terms. The key words here are consistently, early and strong search terms. I could go on for hours, but I won’t. Bob has a great post here about the ins and the outs of this topic.

Anyway, much focus has been put on Google PageRank over the years. I read a lot about this on forum after forum and watch as people cheer or sulk every time Google adjusts their algorithm. The minute they see their website’s PageRank bounce around during a Google update, they freak out and start tearing things apart and asking for all sorts of advice. Granted, a lot of people making these posts are brand new to this stuff and haven’t realized yet that Google PageRank is just not that important. That’s right…it’s just not that important. I know this for a fact. My years of experience have taught me a few things. What is important is your rankings in the search results, which are based on…well, read Bob’s post above. If you are into ecommerce, these rankings affect your income.

So, here is a question: With your own website, have you seen a relationship between your website’s rankings and your Google PageRank?

This really has nothing to do with this morning’s conversation. We actually were talking about conversion. That is, getting people to sign up, spend money or do the thing you want them to do after they arrive at your website. We’ll talk about this later.