Page Rank Doesn’t Matter

If you own a shop would you prefer to get loads of people looking through the window or coming through the door and buying stuff? Hopefully you would prefer to have people buy stuff - you want window shoppers then there is little point in reading the rest of this article.

In order to get customers you need to market your shop. There is little point in having the best deals and a stunning window display if nobody knows you are there. It’s the same with a website. No matter how usable or accessible the site unless anybody knows you exist you are not going to get any visitors let alone convert a sale.

What you need to do is get noticed. Lots of ways to do this - it’s called link building. And the number one rule in link building is that the easier the link is to get, the lower the value of that link. Tell every free directory all about your wonderful website and it is unlikely to get you a single customer. But get a recommendation from a popular and respected website and your conversions will increase.

And so we reach the whole point of the article.

Page Rank doesn’t matter. Turn off your google tool bar and surf the net. Look at pictures, read articles and buy stuff. At any point did you need to know the Page Rank of the sites you visited? The answer is of course no. You visited those sites that met your needs - it didn’t matter at all what their Page Rank was. People get excited about Page Rank because they think it makes them better than everybody else. Which is stupid. Page Rank doesn’t make you any better, it only means you have more inbound links than somebody else as Google tells you on their technology pages. And if you still don’t believe me then here is the explanation as to how Page Rank is calculated.

I began the article by discussing the need to market a website. Wouldn’t it be better to build a site that was vibrant, exciting, popular and converted 10% of it’s visitors (as recommended by Cosmopolitan). Or would you rather spend your life worrying about your Page Rank (by being listed in a thousand free newspapers that nobody reads).

Page Rank doesn’t sell stuff, in fact I’d be willing to bet money that the difference in conversions between two similar sites that have different Page Ranks is minuscule. So turn off your google toolbar, think about your customers needs and give then a site that they will want to visit again and again. Build up a reputation for quality service and you will become noticed by other websites, blogs, forums and social networks. And as your popularity increases so will your ranking, you will move up the results pages which will improve your visibility which means more visitors and more conversions.

All of which has nothing to do with Page Rank. Because Page Rank doesn’t matter.