What is the PageRank of your Website?

What is the PageRank of your Website?

You have a lot of control over which keywords or key phrases families can find your funeral home website with. But if your competitor has those same keywords in their website, how does Google decide who is first in the search result? PageRank is the measurement Google uses. PageRank is a collection of internal metrics Google has assigned concerning your website's credibility, authority, and quality. In fact, Google assigns PageRank to each page of your website.

Suppose you run a search on Google for "best funeral home, Dallas". There will be a huge number of results. Google's algorithm will sift through the millions of indexed websites and display the results in rank order. Remember, these are the natural, organic results not the paid results.

The algorithm is very complicated, and proprietary, but generally works as:

Relevance x PageRank = Search Ranking

Relevance is the measure of how that particular web page matches the search phrase, "best funeral home, Dallas" in this example. Like the other algorithm, relevance is hard to calculate. However, it utilizes the other concepts covered in previous articles, PageTitles, Meta-Data, content on the web page, and keyword choices. Therefore, having "funeral home in the Dallas metroplex" on your home page increases the relevance for that search. Google looks at your website's Meta-Data and content to determine what your site is about. It also looks at the links your website has from other websites with similar content. This information is used to calculate your relevancy for a search phrase.

Google closely guards how they calculate PageRank so there is a lot of speculation as to how it is generated. Most believe that PageRank is calculated by how many other web pages are linking to your website. Even more, not all links are created equal. Quality links are inbound links that come from websites with high PageRank.

Google does publicly announce website PageRank, and the numbers go from 0 to 10 with 10 being the best. Google.com has a PageRank of 10. Sites or pages with a PageRank of 0 to 3 typically have very few inbound links. Rankings of 4 to 5 are sites with a good amount of traffic and have quite a few links. Really popular sites with hundreds of quality links are typically ranked a 6. Top Tier branded companies or hyper-popular websites are generally ranked 7 to 10. So understanding this a little, having 100 PageRank 0 sites linking to you is not as good as having a few PageRank 6 or 7 link to you. The higher ranked inbound links give you more credibility and in turn higher PageRank.

How do you find out the PageRank for your funeral home website? The first way is to go directly to Google and install their Google Toolbar [1]. The second way is to visit a website already mentioned in a previous article at www.websitegrader.com [2]. This site provides a lot of quality information.

To wrap up, if you and your competitor both have the same type of keywords in your content, then you need to have a higher PageRank to be listed higher in the search results. Find a way to determine your PageRank. Start making improvements to your website to increase your relevancy and start getting links to your site to improve your PageRank.