Page Rank Explained for Business Owners

You probably heard by now of the term page rank. While for some of us the term has no mysteries, I always hear small business owners using it in a wrong context without fully understand its meaning.

There are two popular methods to find out a web site page rank: Google and Alexa Traffic Rankings. While Google uses an algorithm to approximate a site`s value, Alexa gives its score based on web traffic.

It`s advisable to use both of them when you want to see what your business site rank is.

Google Page Rank
Google algorithm is company`s best kept secret. If it would be revealed, many web sites would artificially improve their ranking to internet surfers` detriment. And it`s obvious that Google doesn`t want that.

Google uses a scale from 0 to 10 to note web sites. A domain with page rank 9 is more valuable and optimized than a site with page rank 6. According to Wikipedia,

a page rank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web with the purpose of �measuring� its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

So, beside the traffic, Google is also interested in link exchange, site optimization and so on. That is why it`s best to use back links or reciprocal linking from sites with a higher page rank. It`s best to avoid linking with domains that have a page rank lower than 3, unless they are new domains. Because Google is highly interested in link exchange when it calculates a page rank, a lot of SEO developers are planning their web strategy based on link juice.

As you might know, not all links are equal. While it`s better to link your web site to as many domains as possible, try to avoid some of malicious links. How you do that? First of all, beware of the link farms and other suspicious sites. If you would like to link your web site with an unknown web site, you can use a marketing tool � Linkscape � to test how �healthy` the site is and if it was punished by search engines for different violations.

Alexa Traffic Rankings

Alexa measures the traffic and gives a close look of the:

Percent of global internet users who visited your site in the last day/week/month or three months.
A monthly statistic on the top keywords driving traffic to your web site.
Visitors by country.
Link exchange.
Clickstream: a recording of the clicks of one internet user. Alexa also displays what sites people have opened before typing yours in the browser and what sites they`ve accessed after they closed it.