Let’s just get right down to brass tacks. Can you quantify a page rank? In other words, can you go to the SERPs, look at the first 10 sites on page one, and quantify exactly why each site is in the position it’s in? Some folks say yes. I say no. And I’m going to explain why, in no uncertain terms, in this article. I think you will find this very interesting.

I was doing some searching the other day, just for the heck of it. Every now and then I like to see what’s out there. Anyway, I did a search for some off the beaten track niche and took a look at the site that came up number one in the SERPs. It was number one on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and just about every search engine I looked at.

I took a very good, hard, long look at this site. I checked PR. I checked backlinks. I looked at the content of the site. I looked to see how long it was around. I looked to see what keywords it was ranking for and which ones were contained in the domain name, if any. What I found was so astonishing that my jaw dropped to the floor after doing my analysis. Here are some of the low points.

The site had 9 backlinks. The site had a PR of 0. The site had one keyword in its domain name that was fairly relevant, even though it was also ranking for other keywords NOT in its domain name. The site had only one page of content that was so-so to say the least. I will say this much. The on page SEO was excellent. Every outbound link had proper anchor text. The site was only a few months old.

What was surprising about this number one ranking was that the site behind it had more backlinks, more pages, a higher PR and more content. The only thing it didn’t have was a good domain name. It had no keywords in it. Could it be that a domain name carried that much weight?

But then I did other searches in other niches and found that sites with poorly chosen domain names were outranking other sites with good domain names. Digging deeper, I discovered one or two things about the top site that beat out the sites behind it…but they were always different.

Okay, here’s my point and I hope, if nothing else, you get this. There is absolutely NO way to quantify a search engine listing. Some will totally baffle you. Think of the keyword “click here” and how if you look it up, you will find Adobe is the top site…one that doesn’t have the words click here anywhere on the site itself. I won’t go into the reasons for this here but suffice it to say, it’s because of what OTHER sites do and NOTHING to do with what Adobe does.

There are way too many variables to SEO to be able to quantify what will make a site rank well or not. So your best course of action is to concentrate on ALL areas of SEO…on page AND off page. By doing everything possible to improve the ranking of your site, you will GIVE that site the best chance of succeeding.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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