Search Engine Page Ranking

Learning to make your blog relevant in search engine results and page rankings can increase your prominence on a subject if are smart about how and what you post.

Topical Relevance vs. Web Page Ranking

“PageRank has only ever been an approximation of the quality of a web page and has never had anything to do with the measuring of the topical relevance of a web page. Topical relevance is measured with link context and on-page factors such as keyword density, title tag, and everything else.” (PageRank: An Essay)

Increasing Topical Relevance

Use your blog title, blog post titles, tags and headers (< h 1 >, < h 2 >, etc) to your advantage. Make sure you are using key words, i.e. words average people will be searching for, in your title, tags, headers. Understanding your Blog Traffic will help you see what keywords are getting you traffic already.

"The title tag helps the search engines decide the topic and theme of the web page being crawled for indexing. When a search for keywords is conducted, the title tag is given heavy consideration by all search engine algorithms.

Google considers the title tag to be extremely important for keyword searches, and gives strong emphasis on the title tags. The Yahoo and MSN Search algorithms place even more importance on the title tags than Google."

Blog Business World, Title tags: SEO by any other name

Web Page Ranking

"Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the Page Rank algorithm might be the best known. Page Rank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites."(Google Librarian Central)

Smashing Magazine, How does Google Page Rank really work?