SEO pt. IV: Sitemap and PageRank
Monday, August 24th, 2009Now that your dating site content is optimized and ready to get indexed by search engines, it is time for a final stage – submitting your site to search databases.
Among the search engines Google certainly takes the leading position as the most ‘haunted’ one due to being relevant. This is why I will use it as an example while defining the steps you need to take to let search engines know about your site.
So, the initial step to ‘get friends’ with Google is to be the first to introduce yourself by submitting your site URL through this link http://www.google.com/addurl.html. If you don’t do this – the sky won’t fall over your head, and somehow or other Google spiders will find and index your website on their own… But time is precious in terms of promotion and advertising, and we all want your online dating /social community to reach the top as fast as possible. So why not take a few minutes to help the restless Google crawlers? Good news is that you won’t need to re-submit your site URL again even if you change it – once indexed, it will be tracked and updated automatically (provided you changed only the domain name and did not alter the site content).
Next move is submitting your sitemap to Google. Basically, sitemap is a list of all the website links accessible to users organized in a hierarchical (top-to-down) manner. It helps Google crawlers ‘understand’ the structure of your site and, thus, provide a significantly better indexation to its pages (essential for Flash or JavaScript menus not containing HTML links). SkaDate dating software team developed an integrated tool for automatic XML sitemap generation, which allows you to get a ready map of your site structure by a simple button click in the Admin Panel.
So, what happens next? I bet, most of you wonder how exactly Google (or any other search engine) ‘calculates’ the web site’s relevancy and importance for defining its position in search results, what factors it takes into account, and what is the priority of these factors for such evaluation. No one except for the Google staff members knows this mysterious algorithm. Even SEO sharks will hardly ever get close enough to understanding it, as it constantly gets updated. But still there is some useful information for all of us to learn.
Let’s take a look at Google PageRank, often referred to as ‘PR’ (not to confuse with Public Relations). This is how Google itself describes it: ”PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.” PageRank grades from 0 to 10. The higher your web page rank is – the better (www.yahoo.com and www.microsoft.com have PR9, www.google.com has PR10). Please, note that I mentioned a ‘web page’, not a ‘web site’. For a search engine all your site pages are ‘autonomous’ objects for indexation. So, each page will have its own PR. PageRank is invisible to Internet users in search results. But it can be seen by means of a special tool, such as Google Toolbar. It has both numerical and visual (scale bar) indicators.
As you might have understood from the PageRank description given above, it is based on the quantity and (most importantly) quality of the inbound links to your site pages. If a few web sites with good positions in search results (it is 
exactly high search ranks, not PR I am speaking about right now) link to your site, they give you a share of their popularity, thus, helping you to get a better PageRank too. So, you should be quite ‘picky’ while going for link exchange, since even multiple references from web sites with low Search Engine Results Placement (SERP) will not help you much in SEO.
And here comes the most important part. PageRank is just one of many components Google engine takes into consideration while ‘granting’ a search results position to your site. Which means that even if you get a PR which is 10 out of 10 – it does not guarantee you the top position in a search rank. This is proved by a number of examples when a web page with a lower PageRank got a higher SERP as compared to its competitors. Besides, PageRank is solely the Google invention, and does not affect search results positions in other search engines in any way. So, no need to focus only on this ‘magic PR’, but it’s essential to give enough attention to other important aspects, such as developing a carefully-optimized site content, choosing relevant keywords, and many more useful things mentioned in my previous articles devoted to SEO.
Search engine optimization is a science, whose motto is definitely ‘live and learn’. It’s constantly altered and updated. So take time to follow the newest SEO trends and strategies – and you will see how rewarding the results of your online business may be.
From my side, I will always be glad to answer your questions and assist in every way.
Feel free to leave your comments.
Best wishes,
Irene
Image sources: http://www.crsolutionsgroup.com , http://www.tasticproductions.com , http://icp.ge.ch
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