As you will all know by now yesterday saw the third PR update in 2008 and we are only in April. The majority of webmasters will care more about SERPS more than PR but if you monitor your site enough you will see some correlation involved.

A few months ago I entered the “Yicrosoft Directory” competition at SEO Noobs dot com, although I didn’t win I implemented a some standard SEO practices on a standard Wordpress theme and built up under 100 backlinks with 3-4 variations of anchor texts.

Now what is strange is that on reflection on the new update I looked at my site which I hadn’t touched in months or even accessed. To my surprise the little green bar was displaying a PR4, I then proceeded to look at the PR for the top 4 sites under “Yicrosoft directory” and their page ranks were all 4-6. Quite high I’m sure you will agree for websites that are only a few months old about a subject that was made up. This is also not the first time blogs and websites have received high PR updates on young domains.

Now what I believe Google to be doing here is ranking based on an industry level. Say for example you want to rank for a competitive term such as “bank loans” – you may have a 3 year old domain, 50k backlinks and an SEO friendly website, however you still only have a PR of 3 or 4.

Matt…what are you talking about – explain yourself immediately?

Ok, stay with me here – If you have a new keyword phrase, as we all played for (Yicrosoft directory) then out of all websites competing for the term the distribution is shared.

For example:

“mortgages”
• Position 1 - PR 6
o Backlinks: 3 Million
o Domain Age: 2001
• Position 50 – PR 4
o Backlinks: 6,000
o Domain Age: 1996

“Yicrosoft Directory”
• Position 1 – PR 6
o Backlinks: 2,000
o Domain Age: Feb 2008
• Position 50 – PR 2
o Backlinks: 273
o Domain Age: Feb 2008

I know I have only used 4 examples here but you can see the PR’s match but what doesn’t match are the backlinks and domain ages.

So I guess what I’m trying to explain here is that for your website to rank well in the SERPS and achieve a high PR in competitive industries is a lot harder than on less searched terms. Although this conclusion is far from revolutionary, it does explain why new websites and blogs are ranking highly in Page Rank. To me this indicates the up most relevancy and value of a link to your industry or service, random PR links may not be as valuable to you if they are not directly related.

1. Research your keywords – use online tools to check search volumes and competition. The higher the search volumes the harder it will be to rank well, but the more traffic you will get if you rank well!

2. Make sure your page content matches your Title descriptions and Meta data. The titles and Meta data should be as accurate as possible to describe the content.

3. Ensure your H1 tag contain your most desired keyword.

4. Make your H2 and H3 tags contain other important keywords that perhaps you could receive long tailed traffic from (must be relevant to industry).

5. Highlight occasional keywords and phrases in bold to add emphasis for visitors.

6. Look at your source code, see what content the spiders will see first and add value to this content, for example; if it’s a link – add a keyword / phrase, if its copy – add keyword or phrase to sentence.

7. Add keywords to your link descriptions within text copy, avoid “click here” and “read more” descriptions, but again make it relevant to the destination.

8. If you use any references to external websites also provide a link pointing to the source, this adds credibility to the content.

9. A sales page will not help you rank for a keyword, be informative and provide good detail on a page, include a click to action to your sales page if necessary.

10. Do not over use keywords in your individual page content. I have seen pages include a 3 keyword phrase more than 30 times on a single page and be placed 3 pages behind websites with 10-15 keywords on.

11. Make your content readable for your users not just the spiders, after all it’s the users you want to impress.

12. Include your targeted keyword and phrase in the first sentence – although there is no real proof this helps I personally believe it does.

13. When writing around images or using images to backup your copy, give an accurate description of what the image is for or what it refers to.

14. Be sure to add your companies address on the site, either on the contact page or elsewhere.

15. Don’t use text under 8pts to write your main copy - no one enjoys squinting (yes I know my text is quite small).

16. Use recognisable fonts – not everyone has the same font’s as you!

17. Make sure you don’t duplicate content throughout the website; each page should be unique, excluding the navigation etc.

18. Include keywords in Alt descriptions of images but don’t stuff them silly people!

19. Use http://validator.w3.org to check your website once the copy is added.

20. The best way to write good SEO friendly copy is to use your common sense more than anything. Be your own judge on what you think visitors will want to see, at the same time remember that spiders and bots do need to see your target keywords to make you visible in the searches!

The image above was a welcome surprise when I logged on to Facebook this morning - There is now a real time chat service, like Instant messenger. At the moment the features are nice and simple (which I like), you can set your status to “Online” or “Offline” depending on how chatty you feel. You can see which of your friends are online at any time.

Thinking about this service after the initial “surprise” is this feature something Facebook users want? For me it’s a place where I can message my friends, join groups, read discussions and occasionally find some good links (SEO related of course). If I wanted to chat to friends I would phone them or use an IM service - Facebook was my getaway from the real world for me - Perhaps I liked someone enough to “add them” as a friend but to actually engage in conversation is a whole other matter.

I’m sure Facebook will add and add to this feature eventually consuming what was once a simple medium to interact into a complicated web of ads and notifications. Anyway - I’m not casting judgment yet and have setup a poll - let me know what you think?

More value has been given to the ownership and authentication of domains as of late. Just a few years ago and a basic HTML sitemap would have been substantial enough to keep the search engines happy. Times have changed and with it comes the era of XML valid sitemaps. I always create a XML sitemap for clients, doing this helps the search engines identify pages within the website that perhaps have endured indexing issues.

So what do I do with my sitemap once its uploaded?

Once your shiny new sitemap is live and uploaded to your root directory of your website you need to let the big boys know where it is. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own form of a “webmaster console”. This console is an area where you submit your sitemap to each search engine, you will also need to add a random HTML file or add a line of Meta data to your index page – this is just a bit of protection against people trying to hack your data – it validates that you own the domain.

Once your sitemap is submitted and you have validated that you are the rightful owner of your domain you are open to a world of knowledge about your domain and its performance. Each console has varying features, undoubtedly Google offers the most (as you would expect) but each is useful in its own way.

The locations to each console can be found here:

Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster

For a more detailed explanation of sitemaps visit Google’s page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34654

If you are lazy and want a sitemap created automatically then visit this site: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Well it has to be said Google has been anything but predictable regarding Page Rank updates in 2008, having 2 already in 2008. Check your own page rank at Dig Page Rank to see the numerous datacenters are behaving abnormally. I detected this activity before the last PR update, which I was quick to blog about. This could be however a Google link update, the same activity happens then also - Either way, an update is happening.

If you want to find out some more information about Page Rank then visit Google’s Page Rank page to learn a bit more.