A Scoop of SEO: How to optimize your Website’s Page Rank?

“No website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is SEO.”

To begin with, what is Page Rank?

Most of us are aware that PageRank is the algorithm that is used by Google Search to rank web pages in order of their priority against the search queries fired by the users. But a few basic criteria that this very powerful algorithm incorporated by the world’s most popular search engine stands upon are, (let us consider page A to be the page under examination) :

1. Examination of the link structure: It counts the number and quality of in-links(links from other websites to your website) to page A.
2. Quality of in-links: It analyses the page that points to the page A.
3. Role of priority: A page with a higher priority pointing to page A is given more weightage over a page of lower priority pointing to A. Thus say, if page B and page C are pointing to A at any instant of time and (page rank of B) > (page rank of C), B will contribute more to increase the page rank of A.
4. Effect of out-bound links: The more outbound links (links from your website to other websites) that the page C has, the lesser will it page A profit from receiving a link to it from C.

The Analogy between page Rank and Social Networking Sites:

To understand it better, let us view Page Rank as a social networking platform where people can be substituted by websites. Just like the prestige of a person on Twitter, Instagram can be analyzed by the number of followers he has, its the same case here too where the prestige of a site is determined by the number and priority of web pages that link to it.

“Focusing on quality (backlinks) over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates.”
- Adam Riemer from the SearchEngineJournal

Breaking down the Page Rank Algorithm:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d [ PR(T1)/O(T1) + PR(T1)/O(T1) +...+ PR(Tn)/O(Tn)]

PR(A) → Page Rank of A
T1...Tn → Pages that link to page A
PR(Ti) → Page Rank of the T pages that have links to A on them
O(Ti) → Total number of outbound links from the page Ti
d → damping factor that lies between 0 to 1.

In the simplest of terms, the probability that a person surfing the web arrives at page A would be equal to the sum of the probabilities of his clicking on links on other pages that direct him to page A. This sum is - PR(T1)/O(T1) + PR(T1)/O(T1) +…+ PR(Tn)/O(Tn).
This probability is further reduced by a factor d in order to normalize between 0 and 1.
The ( 1 - d ) signifies that the person will sometime end up on a page that has no outgoing links from it.

Let us take a look at a simple example:

Considering a small web of 4 pages

Let us consider a web of 4 pages,

1. PR(A) = (1-d) + d[PR(B)/2 + PR(C) + PR(D)/2]
2. PR(B) = (1-d) + d[PR(A)+PR(D)/2]
3. PR(C) = (1-d) + d[PR(B)/2]
4. PR(D) = (1-d) + d*0 = 1-d

Note that since no other page links to D, page D has the lowest priority of them all and A has the highest priority.

Note:

1. In order to get a fair approximation of the Page Rank values of the whole web, about a 100 iterations of subsequent RageRank calculation using the steps mentioned above are needed.

2. The sum of the Page Rank of all pages will still combine to give the total number of pages, so the average Page Rank of a page will remain 1.

How does the Google Search Engine rank pages?

1. Text body, title tag, URL of the page are taken into consideration. Therefore, make sure to include keywords or frequently searched terms in the title tag of your web page to boost its ranking.
2. Google calculates an IR (Integrated Reasoning) score of factors that are specific to a page like the text within the anchor tags of inbound links. The text is further weighed by its position and relative prominence in the document to calculate the final IR score. SEMrush is a SEO tool that generates a report on several features like keyword position tracking, backlinks, keywords, traffic cost, organic search rank to name a few.
3. The IR score and Page Rank score are then scaled to decide the relevance of a page out of the trillions of pages available in Google’s index. The two scores are multiplied. Note that they aren’t added since otherwise pages that might not even be related to the search query would rank higher in the search result if they would have a high page rank.
4. Effect of Inbound Links: Every additional link increases the value of Page Rank by a factor of (d x PR(i)/O(i)). Thus add as many new pages as possible to your website and link them to the front page. It has been found that for each new page that you add to your website, its Page Rank increases by approximately 0.428.
5. Page Speed: Sites that don’t load fast enough are penalized since more than 50% of the users are found to abort searches not loading within the first minute.
6. Domain Age and Authority: An older and more optimized site is much more likely to have a better rank.
7. Content Length: Pages with over 1200 words receive far better ranking to feature on the first page of the search query results.
8. Artificial intelligence: Factors like click through rate(percentage of people who are clicking on your website), bounce rate(number of people bouncing away from your website on not finding relevant content) and dwell time(amount of time people are spending on your website) further determine the ranking.

Does your site have a content length of >2500? You are at an advantage :)

Apart from these, Google considers several other factors for ranking. Only the major ones have been mentioned here. You can find a detailed description of the 200 Ranking factors considered by Google as of 2019 here.

Note:
Even if the pages that link to your page have low priority, they are still helpful in elevating your page rank since it is directly dependent on the sum of values from all inbound pages.

To summarize the points you need to keep in mind to boost your site’s ranking:

1. Keep the meta descriptions precise.
2. Use as many keywords as possible all throughout your content.
3. Leave the links of your site as comments on higher priority websites or advertise your website in other sites and relevant channels. That will help in increasing the page rank of your page as it would mean more inbound links from high prestige pages.
4. Include videos: Most people are willing to watch videos than read long paragraphs of text. So including videos can help improve site traffic by a margin
5. See that your page loads fast and is navigable across all kinds of devices.
6. Include frequently searched for terms in the title tag, body and heading.
7. Link all the pages to the front page of your site.

Conclusion:

Thus, this is all that Search Engine Optimization encapsulates. SEO is all about maximizing the number of visitors to your site to boost its ranking in the results. In the world we live in today, the rank 1 search result plays the same role as the most popular people we are following on Instagram. Thus to thrive in a society where majority of the population stays online, to only have your own website is not enough, how well connected your site is to the rest of the web is what matters. And SEO helps you do just that!

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