If you are an online article writer trying to making money online from article writing and creating web content, you must be wondering how to increase your rankings; you landed on the right page because the terms Google Page Rank and SERPs are explained here to help you get started with basic search engine optimization techniques. I’m guessing that you already know that Pagerank and SERPS are important factors in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). PageRank and SERPs are two elements which drive traffic to your online articles and journals – visitors, and consequently Amazon sales and ad clicks.

Pagerank and SERP’s are two related terms, however, they refer to two different things.

What is PageRank?

The term PageRank refers to the algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine to assess the importance and relevance of a website and of every webpage on the web. A websites and webpages can be ranked based on a numerical weighting from 0-10. For example, the page rank value of Seekyt is 3 out of 10 possible points (which is great for such a young site), but different pages within Seekyt will have different pageranks.

The main determinants influencing the pagerank of every Seekyt page are:

1. quality of page content,
2. how many internal links you have to each page,
3. the quality and number of external links that pointing to other domains
4. the quality backlinks pointing to your webpages,
5. how long your page has been in existence.

#1 – Quality of page content

Google gives a high pagerank to pages which offer the best user experience and give the reader as much information as possible on a certain topic. Consequently, these pages are put at the top of the search results. For example, the apple in Google’s eye is Wikipedia (PageRank 9/10) and the pages within Wikipedia may have a pagerank from 5-9. This is because (among other things) Wikipedia offers high-quality content and it has a great internal linking structure.

#2 – Internal links on page

A link to a page in the same domain is considered internal. This means that if you link to your own webpage on Seekyt or to a page created by another Seekyt member, you’ve got internal links on your pages, and you can use these to make the most of the referral program. Internal links are very important because they make navigation easy, lower the bounce rate and exit rate, increase average time on page and consequently conversion rates.

Bounce rates and exit rates are often confused – both terms are elements of web analytics, for example, Google Analytics:

‘Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and ‘bounce‘(leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.‘

‘Exit rate in web analytics is the percentage of visitors to a site who actively click away to a different site from a specific page, after possibly having visited any other pages on the site. The visitors just exited on that specific page.‘

Don’t over-optimize your webpages with links because this scenario may be interpreted as spammy; a healthy balance of relevant links adding important additional information to the topic will have the best effect.

#3 – External links on page

External links are hyperlinks that point at any domain other than the domain the link exists on (your webpage). External links are generally to be avoided, but when they absolutely contribute to the quality of your webpage by providing important and useful additional information, you can include them in your articles. When using external links, make sure you link to authority websites and trustworthy sources.

#4 – Backlinks

This element is the hardest element of search engine optimization. If you create remarkable web content and capture the attention of other readers who like it, you are going to get links – natural backlinks pointing to your webpage. Other than that, you may have to work on backlinks yourself – learn what you can do to build backlinks to your articles and journals, and increase Google PageRank in this tutorial.

#5 – How long your page has been in existence

Brand-new pages often have no pagerank at all. Although it may happen that your webpage gets indexed by Google in just a few hours and miraculously ends up on the first page of the search results (it happened to me once J), normally it takes time for your webpage to mature and get indexed. To speed up the process of indexing, you can submit your brand-new post to Google.

What Are SERPs?

‘A search engine results page (SERP), is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.‘

The term SERP’s refers to where your webpages are in Google’s search results for a given keyword or keyphrase. The full term is Search Engine Result Pages. If you’ve written an article or journal about ‘writing online articles,’you’d want your webpage to come up high in the search results when someone types ‘writing online articles’ into the Google search box.

People usually visit the first three (usually less than 10) results out of 10 shown on the first search engine result page. If you are searching for information about ‘making money online,’you probably look at the first results, too and don’t even check the second page or the 50th page in the SERPs, right?

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Normally, your webpage will show up high in the SERPs first, and a high pagerank will follow later. The first thing to do in order to increase your Google PageRank is to make sure your articles and journals are gaining high search engine results positions using webpage optimization techniques.

The more high quality content placed high in the search results by individual Seekyt members, the higher the overall pagerank of the site will become – the benefits go both ways.

You don’t need an SEO expert to charge you a fortune for basic SEO steps you can learn and implement yourself. In order to get high position in the search engine result pages and increase Google page rank, you need to:

1. Optimize your keywords and/or keyphrases using a keyword tool generator, for example, Google Keyword Tool. It shows information for broad terms based on your query, but if you change the setting to exact (phrase) and find a low advertising competiton for a given keyword combined with high monthly search numbers, you may profit from this keyword in the long run.
2. Optimize Article and/or Journal Title – include the keywords you want to rank for in your title.
3. Optimize the First Paragraph – use your main keywords in the first paragraph once or twice.
4. Optimize the Body of the Text – use your main keywords in the body of the text a few times (depending on the article length),
5. Optimize the Last Paragraph – use your main keywords in the last paragraph once or twice.
6. Tag Your Webpages – tag your article properly because tags will help search engines to categorize your content. In addition, the first five tags will determine the related links on your webpages on Seekyt (automated related post links in the section above the comments).
7. Content Length – The number of words required to publish an article at Seekyt is 400 (or 2000 characters), but I recommend article length between 800-1150+.

Page URL is also one of the most important elements of webpage optimization, but you don’t have to worry about it if you are publishing on this site – Seekyt will optimize your URL based on the title you’ve chosen when you submit your article for publishing.

If you found this explanation of Google PageRank and SERPs useful and if your questions about how to increase your rankings have been answered, share this webpage with your social networks using the buttons below, leave a comment or ask a question (if there’s still something confusing)!