One of the well known facts of marketing is that higher visibility always results in better business. This is the reason why most organizations are concerned about the location of their offices and workshops. The same is true for the virtual world and companies that have websites listed on the first page of a search engine will definitely get more hits and subsequently more business as compared to websites that are languishing on the 20th page. This rank on a search engine is not something you can purchase and it is almost completely dependent on Search Engine Optimization commonly known as SEO.
The following are the main criteria that a search engine considers when it decides the rank of a particular website from among the thousands and millions that are pulled up with a particular keyword:

1. The most important thing is the quality of content as this is something that the spiders of the search engine recognize instantly and easily. A website with relevant and unique content will almost always be placed above a website that has concentrated more on the outlay of the site and less on the original content. Search engines reward good content and display these sites above older sites from more reputed organizations. Hence, take care of your content and update it as frequently as possible and the search engines will take care of the page rank of your website.
2. Age of the website is also another key factor as the spiders crawl through older websites more often than they do through the newer ones. Hence, older websites automatically get a higher rank. This can be explained by an analogy from the real world. When you are engaged in business and have to give credit, you are much more comfortable giving credit to someone who has been working with you for years as against someone who has just started to work for you. The same is true for search engines and hence they place priority on an older website over the comparatively newer ones.
3. Other factors that impact the page rank are the frequency of updating the site, value of incoming links and the internal linking structure. Most search engines use a mathematical formula to display more relevant sites over the less relevant options.

The biggest issue is that most search engines take between one to three months to update the results and hence a change that you make today will not immediately impact the rank of your website. SEO is basically a continuous process that involves tweaking various factors and continuously adding quality content. You have to invest a lot of time, effort and money to get the desired results. Moreover, the type of keywords being targeted also makes a huge difference as a common and much used word like “diet” would require longer and more intensive optimization as there are thousands of entries that will be pulled up with this word. The bottom line is that SEO is not a 100 meter dash but a long and continuous marathon and the only winners are those who keep at it for prolonged periods of time and do not give up hope and stop.

People often mistake PR or Google Page Rank for high traffic websites. [ What is Page Rank? ] Having a high PR website does not really mean that you are going to get tons of traffic, it only means that Google has ranked your page trustworthy because you have back links from a number of high page rank websites.

Google’s page rank ranges from 0 to 10 which basically measure the importance of a website or blog. Nobody really know how Google’s algorithm measures page rank, however experts believe that one of the factors are high quality back links. However lately, Google has reevaluated its algorithm to decrease the importance given to back links.

So What good is Page Rank?

A good Page Rank means that Google has found your website to be good and search engine optimized. It also means that Google trusts you since you have other Google trustworthy sites linking back to you. Having a good PR will also make it easy for you to get more back links to you websites since other websites on the internet like linking to high PR websites and blogs. With a high PR you also increase your chances of making money via your blogs since companies pay high PR blogs to publish links and advertisements on their sites.

Getting Traffic to Your Website

Having a high PR ranking does not necessarily mean that Google is going to give you a high ranking in its organic search results. If your goal is to get high quality and organic traffic to your website, Page Rank is certainly going to be a factor but its not going to be a deciding factor.

Getting traffic is also not about just targeting Google. If you want good traffic you should also optimize your website for other search engines such as Yahoo, and Bing. At least until Bing eats Yahoo. Google certainly gets seventy five percent of the world’s search traffic but competition for new websites is tough on Google.