The concept of Google PageRank is widely misconstrued, so I thought I would take the time today to discuss this often confusing and perhaps overvalued means of judging a web page. First, let’s debunk a common misconception about PageRank: the term “PageRank” does not refer to “the rank of a page.” Actually, PageRank is named after Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google. PageRank is a trademark belonging to Google, and its process is patented by Stanford University, which Page was attending at the time he began working on the technology that would eventually propel him to billionaire status in his early thirties and change the internet forever.

What is PageRank?
PageRank is a metric that uses the democratic nature of the Web to measure the quality of a particular page based on its inbound linkage from other sites. In essence, a link to a page is considered a “vote” for that page, and pages to which other sites frequently link are considered more important than pages that attract little to no links. However, it is not the sheer number of links pointing to a page that contributes to its PageRank, but the quality of the web pages linking to it. In other words, links from pages with high PageRank are weighted more heavily than links from pages with low or no PageRank.

Although Google does state in its Tips for Webmasters that PageRank “helps determine the rank of a site in our search results”, site owners who constantly worry about improving PageRank scores are wasting their time. Want proof? A simple search using Google is all you have to do. Let’s look at an example.

In a Google search for the phrase “pet supplies,” the following are pages currently appearing in the top 10 search results along with their respective PageRank scores*:

#1: PR5 http://www.nextdaypets.com/directory/pet_supplies/
#2: PR7 http://www.petco.com/Content/HomePage.aspx?PC=home&Nav=1&=
#3: PR7 http://www.amazon.com/pet-supplies-birds-cats-dogs/b?ie=UTF8&node=12923371
#4: PR4 http://www.petsuppliesplus.com/
#5: PR4 http://www.jefferspet.com/ssc/
#6: PR7 http://www.petsmart.com/home/index.jsp
#7: PR5 http://www.petsupplies.com/
#8: PR3 http://www.cheappetstore.com/
#9: PR6 http://www.drsfostersmith.com/
#10: PR4 http://www.petstreetmall.com/

Notice in the list above that the #1 ranking page has a PageRank of 5, and is ranked higher in the search results than four sites which have higher PageRank scores. Similarly, two results with a PageRank of 4 are ranked higher in the search results than pages with scores of 5, 6 and 7. In this case, the relevance of a page to a given search query appears to contribute more heavily to its search engine ranking than the PageRank value of that particular page.

Here is another example to help explain the basis of this scenario. Say you own a site with a PageRank of 8 that specializes in fine chocolate, but also sells flavored popcorn. Now assume for instance I own a site with a PageRank of 5 specializing only in flavored popcorn. In a search for the phrase “fine chocolate,” your site will undoubtedly beat out my popcorn site in the search results. However, in a search for “flavored popcorn,” my site will most likely rank higher than yours due to its greater relevance to the search phrase.

Often, site owners spend too much energy worrying about the PageRank toolbar. PageRank can only give you a general idea of a page’s reputation. It does not attract traffic to your site, while search engine visibility for terms related to your offering does attract traffic. If you want to sell online, your efforts would be better spent creating and publishing quality content relevant to your industry, which in turn will attract links that help your rankings as well as your PageRank score Quality inbound links from relevant sites are of course still important to search engine rankings, but if high PageRank was really the coveted holy grail of high rankings that many site owners perceive it to be, Google would probably not be sharing the information with us in the first place.

*Data collected on 7/30/2008

-Pam Westbrook, Ecommerce Marketing/Copywriting

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A nofollow attribute is: A.) A sign you slap on your kid’s back before they walk to school. B.) A fog of noxious aroma that follows a person who does not bathe. C.) A gadget James Bond uses to cloak his Aston Martin convertible as he narrowly escapes his nemeses. D.) An attribute assigned to a hyperlink to prevent backlink hungry spammers from benefitting from clogging blogs and forums with useless posts.

Unless it actually is scheduled to be in the next Bond movie, D is the only correct answer. A nofollow attribute is a concept created by Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Sheller of blogger.com in 2005 to prevent spammers from simply going into blogs and forums, leaving comments with links to their own sites, and expecting to get backlinks. Not all forums and blogs use this attribute, but it was strongly pushed when it came out.

How does this affect you as a merchant? If you are familiar with how search engine rankings work, you know that search engine optimization has much to do with the number and quality of sites that link back to yours. If you comment on other sites and leave a link to your store, if that blog or forum designates all links to be “nofollow”, your PageRank will not increase as a result of that target link. Will other users still be able to click on that link? Yes. Will it improve your search engine results? No.

How can you tell if a link to your site actually improves your search engine rankings by giving it “link juice?”
1.) If you right click a page to “View Page Source”, you can check to see if that hyperlink is accompanied by rel=”nofollow”.
2.) You can install the Firefox SEO plugin. It will highlight all nofollow links.

How effective is the nofollow attribute in preventing spam? This is up for dispute. Google highly recommends using the nofollow attribute to cut down on people piggybacking on your posts. Akismet, who actually creates spam filters, claims nofollow links do no such thing. Considering there are already software packages to mass produce comment spam, the majority of forums and blogs still use the nofollow attribute.

So why bother leaving comments or participating in forums? 1.) Nofollow links only apply to Google’s search engine and 2.) fortunately, there are other readers of blogs and forums besides search engine bots–people. Learn how to interact with current and potential customers by reading up on the social web.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: NoFollow Attribute, NoFollow Tag, Link Juice, Off Page SEO, Offpage SEO, No Follow Attribute, NoFollow Definition, NoFollow, Volusion

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Writing for search engines is evil. After all, Google prides itself in its ability to constantly innovate its algorithms so that those trying to trick the system will not dominate the search engine rankings. You should write the content on your site only for the people who read it, right?

When thousands of dollars can be at stake just by slipping to the second page of Google, can we realistically expect merchants to think about content this way?

Fortunately, Google also gives us access to many pages that explain how search engines work and how you can use them to gain better exposure on the web. Search engine bots see content (=words in text form, not images) linked to pages. If you want to understand how this occurs, check out HowStuffWorks’s explanation of how search engines spider your pages. It’s pretty thorough, and at the very least you will discover this very cool site.

So after understanding how search engines work, how do you know that you are writing effectively enough for them to pick up your content? SEO is one of the most common aspects of marketing covered on the web, and there are many tools on the web that show how your site’s SEO fairs.

Perhaps the site with the highest number of useful tools is seochat.com. Here are just a few notable tools from their site:

Keyword Density Tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density
Although the proper keyword density for each page is disputed, having a strong keyword density will tell search engines exactly what is on that page so it can get picked up.

Link Popularity Tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/link-popularity
Shows all sites linking to particular pages of your site.

Keyword Position Tool:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-keyword-position
This tool will show you how you rank in search engines for particular keywords.

Spider Simulator:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator
This tool will simulate how a search engine spider views your page.

There are many other tools on this site that will help you create AdWords campaigns, block certain bots from spidering your site, check PageRank, and more. Be sure to focus on writing good homepage content, as this is the first text search engine spiders will see. When you write this content, the text shouldn’t be so bot-oriented that it drives traffic to your website but doesn’t keep them there.

You have the tools now, so get to writing!

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Cool SEO tools, Online SEO tools, SEO Tools, volusion, Writing for Search Engines, volusion

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By early 2007, Mike Anderson at partycheap.com realized his online store had a problem. His custom built ecommerce solution was not scalable. It was good for about 10-30 orders a day, but could not handle the volume of orders he received at that time.

Mike decided to go with Volusion’s online shopping cart with a very serendipitous result: partycheap.com’s internal product pages were being indexed by Google and other search engines. Customers began to find his holiday-themed party supplies, costumes, and decorations directly on search engine result pages.

As soon as Mike and the staff at PartyCheap realized that Volusion’s shopping cart was improving their search engine results, they decided to capitalize by improving the site’s content. “We had top ten search rankings for some of our key theme party terms on our old site, but only on a couple of category pages. With Volusion, each single product page has the opportunity to get ranked. Once we realized the advantage the Volusion software gave us, we spent a lot of manpower filling out the meta tags and writing unique content for not only categories, but for individual products as well. It’s hard work, but over a three month period our organic search traffic has doubled,” said Anderson.

The term “hard work” is an understatement from Mike Anderson. Mike and the PartyCheap staff used two people full time for two months to fill out metatags and keyword rich product descriptions and category pages for over 6,000 theme party and holiday themed supplies, decorations, and costumes. They also used Volusion’s internal search reports to figure out what customers were searching for and created searchable categories for those as well.

What does Mike think about Volusion’s more css-driven, SEO friendly Version 5? “The upgrade was straightforward and our customers didn’t even notice the difference.”

Currently, Mike and the PartyCheap staff are getting ready for the holidays by increasing their line of holiday and New Years decorations.

Although Volusion’s tools have made their business more scalable, they vow to continue putting in the work it takes to bring in traffic and close sales. What advice does Mike have to offer other merchants? “Running an eCommerce storefront is a never-ending job. Anyone who thinks they can just open up an online store and expect money to pour in is going to be disappointed. Focus on small fundamentals, product selection, vendor costs, marketing ROI, and transaction costs. The advantage that Volusion gives us is that they take care of the technology and we can focus on our specific industry.”

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

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“I’ve optimized the content on my site as well as all of my metatags. I have quite a few backlinks built up. Much of my site is custom designed as well. Despite all of my work, I am not getting great traffic, and the customers who are going to my site just aren’t buying. What am I doing wrong?”

We do expect that when a store owner does the work to market their site and improve their products, they do better. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Competition is stiff and more and more sites are being added to the web everyday.

Fortunately for merchants with concerns such as the one above, there are options they are probably missing. If you read a post from several weeks ago called “Increase Your Online Sales by Marketing to a Niche”, you read about the benefits of narrowing your marketing scope to better corner a market. This concept does not just apply to new merchants. Existing merchants can separate their products into different niche sites to better optimize their site for usability and SEO.

Here are the advantages of separating your site into several niche sites rather than trying to be a jack of all trades:

1. ) Your site will be much easier to optimize for search engines. Your domain name will probably better reflect your product because your product is more specialized. The content on the page will better reflect specific keywords that customers are using. Your categories and metatags will also reflect more specific keywords. You can also get more relevant backlinks from sites that are chock full of useful keywords. It’s good all around for SEO.

2.) Your site will be much easier to use for your customers. Think about it—is it easier to find the Pinot Noir section in a Super Wal-Mart or in a wine store? The difference between buying from you and buying from another merchant is just a click away, so making it easy to find any product a customer wants is critical.

If you do happen to sell some of the same products on both sites, don’t sweat it. If you are a Volusion Version 5 customer who is on a gold plan or above, you can manage your inventory for both sites using StoneEdge. Here’s more information on setting up this XML feed.

Dominate a niche by dedicating a site to a specific type of product. It will make the work you do to your site that much more effective.

–Michelle Greer, Marketing Specialist

http://www.volusion.com

Technorati Tags: Increase Traffic Store, Online Retail Marketing, Niche Strategies, Marketing Online Store, Volusion

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