Its all about the PAGE RANK stupid!
Ok first off, I don't want to offend anyone, so I have to start off with the disclaimer. I am not calling you stupid, I am not calling anyone in your family stupid and of course I would never call your dog stupid. The stupid I am referring to is in reference to myself.
As some of the people that I have interacted with here at WA know, I have been messing around with website building for more than a few years. I suck/sucked at it. I would read tons of how tos, all abouts and watched 1.2million videos on website building. I didn't even know what a content management system (Wordpress, Joombla, Drupal) was until about 3 years ago. Before that I created my website by hand using classic html. No surprise, those sites didn't do well at all. After learning about CMS and using wordpress, I got all excited and transferred 2 of my sites over. After years of following these sites, no surprise, still no traffic.
At one point, I got excited because one day I figured out, I could research popular trends, see what popular keywords were getting thrown around and create some posts based on those keywords. Again, no surprise, I didn't get much, if any traffic. This was the start of my depression stage, after spending years working on my website, I absolutely had no idea how to bring in the traffic. I gave up for a while and dove into other things, even cancelled a website I had for over 10 years.
This brings me to the point where I found Wealthy Affiliate. I wasn't even looking for website knowledge or website building advice and tips, I was browsing through work at home ideas. Which eventually led me here.
I am still newbie, as I have been here for a little more than a month and I have almost finished the Certification Course 3. My website is coming along nicely and I have learned a ton of things that I had no idea about. The number one thing I have learned so far is that I did have the right idea about keywords and popular trends, I was just going after the wrong ones. I didn't realize at that time you don't stand a very high chance of competing with the first couple of pages of search results for top keywords/keyphrases that have estimated traffic of 100k and competition over 400. The zinger here is all about Kyles term "Low Hanging Fruit". Those are the keywords that have SOME estimated traffic and low competition. One you find some good ones using Jaaxy or the WA Keyword tool, I recommend verifying them with SERPS to make sure the estimated traffic is close. Then follow the Wealthy Affiliate guidelines about writing good content for those keywords.
Once you have a few posts under your belt, keep tabs on your posts and their performance. The number one tool I use is https://serps.com/tools/rank-checker/ to check the page rank of my posts. I recently found that 4 of my posts were not ranking at all thanks to this tool. I touched them up a bit, reworked the keywords, republished them and the next day they were ranked between 25 to 112. I didn't care at that point where they ranked, just as long as they did show in the results.
So basically it boils down to, if your page/post is not getting ranked for your keywords, you will NOT show up in search results at all and no one will ever find your webpage/post, and you will never get any real traffic.
My next adventure will be to understand ways of improving your page rank. The higher you rank, the better the chances of getting found and clicked on in the search results!
Thank for spending some time with me and listening to my chatty Kathy dialogue, its a bit long winded, but I felt it was an important topic that quite a few people are asking about!
Please let me know what you think in the comments below and of course, check out my website at https://believeyoucandle.com!
Thank you!
:)
Recent Comments
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Great blog post! I think we get so caught up in designing our websites and writing content that we forget to check if our posts are ranking at all! I'm off to check mine now.
When you saw your's weren't showing up at all how did you rework them? Did you add the keyword in more often or just make them longer?
I gave a few of my posts almost a month, checking them every week and every week they never showed up in SERPS at all for the keywords I was targeting.
I did new research for keywords similar to the original ones and when I found a good one, I changed the title using that keyword, changed the header inside the post and altered my keyword phrase inside my post content.
I then changed the All-In-One Seo title at the bottom and the page description to use this new keyword/keyphrase.
I changed the published date to the current date and clicked update. I made sure the URL did NOT change since it has been indexed by google already.
The next day these pages showed up in SERPS for the keywords I was targeting. Some were ranked at 25 others were over 112 but at least they showed up.
Since then also, the pages now show up in my Google Webmaster Search Console.
I am not saying this is the guaranteed method or that this is even a good practice, just that this is what I did and these are the results!
Happy marketing to you and good luck!
:)
Great post and much of it I can identify with through my marketing journey over the years before I found WA. Thanks for the disclaimer in the first paragraph by the way - I'll call off my lawyers now lol! :-0)
Cheers
Rich
Lol, after I wrote it, I felt bad thinking people might assume I was calling them stupid so I had to put that in there.
Thank you!
:)
One of the expressions we used in the Forces to describe short and simple training documents was 'Idiot Guides'. We used to think nothing of it. When a group of us were returning to Civilian life we were on a training course to prepare us for the transition and somebody asked about an Idiots Guide being made available to summarise everything we'd been taught. The Tutor went absolutely ballistic! He couldn't believe someone had said something so 'offensive'. He obviously wasn't used to dealing with us crude, crass military types! Needless to say we all found his reaction utterly hilarious and we all did our best to wind him up as much as possible over the course of the week. I think he went looking for a job at a kindergarten after that!
Thanks for the heads up on SERPS. Another chargeable site but free use looks ok. Like your candle info BTW.
Awesome! Thank you very much!
Another great tool is https://app.kwfinder.com. I love the extra keywords and how it rates the competition!
Thanks!
:)
Have book-marked it. My head's still spinning a bit at the mo with all the tools to use but will no doubt assimilate it all as I progress.
Thanks
Mark
Page rank is 00's :)
Page rank can be thought of as a stream....it flows into a page through inbound links, and out of that page through outbound links.
Every time this google goo hits an outbound link it loses just a bit of it's volume. This is because mathematically speaking this PR goo could be magnified when in theory it should be reduced.
Of course, PR is not what it once was. I remember a time when corralling that green G-mana was all that mattered.
Hello Sub!
Yeah, I may have inadvertently used the old term PAGE RANK, but that isn't the same one I am referring to here. This one is just referring to how your page ranks for certain keywords and uses a few tools to check on the status of your ranking for those keywords.
To tell you the truth, I forgot all about the old Page Rank (PR) and how everyone wanted to get that PR5+, lol.
Thanks for the input!
:)
LOL...I gotcha.
Gotta say, it'd been quite a while since I heard mention of that phrase.
Now I see your post in a whole different light. :)
I understand you can modify the content (with the purpose of getting it ranked); however, can one change the title of the page or post (or would that just damage the SEO)?
I have seen some people say that since the post has been indexed, Google may frown on changing the title.
Personally, I would rather have the post title reflect and score better with a better more appropriate keyword.
I have found more information about reviving old posts or updating old posts with new information and they all stated that they do update the title.
I do know that after I updated these non-ranked posts, 4 of them, that they did rank the next day between position 25 and 112, so that is a good thing to me.
Thanks!
:)
First of all, what does it mean exactly to be non-ranked? I suppose it will show somehow on the tool, but what does being non-ranked mean; I mean, is there a specific number position that makes it non-ranked, like maybe position 1000?
Second, I think changing the title would also change the "permalink", wouldn't it? and isn't that a big issue?
For me non ranked means the post doesn't show up in the results for tools such as https://serps.com/tools/rank-checker/.
They show 250 results, but you can enter your exact url for the keyword your checking. If you page/post doesn't show at all for the keywords your trying to target, that means its non-ranked and will not show up in search results using those keywords.
I did not change my URL's for my revised posts. This was a little gray area, but since the urls were already indexed, I just kept them the same and only changed the title. I am not seeing too many people saying this is a bad practice. If you do change the URL, you would need to do some kind of redirect or else any websites that use that old URL will link to a dead page and that would definitely cause issues with Google.
:)
I'm a bit confused. I thought changing the title automatically changes the URL. No matter. I'll deal with this later. I'm sure I'll understand it more as I advance in the training.
For now, it's important to be aware of how it's important to rank and that there's a ranking tool.
Thanks!
If the post has been published and you change the title, the URL will stay the same unless you have a plugin installed that changes it.
These are the only times the URL will change from my tests...
* When you first create post, enter the title, the post will auto save and create the URL
* If you change the title of an UNPUBLISHED post and click save as draft, the url will change to the title
* If you change the title and click on publish for an UNPUBLISHED post, the URL will change.
If the post has been published and you change the title, the URL will stay the same unless you have a plugin installed that changes it.
:)
Oh, I see now. The URL stays the same if the post was already published and you change title later. It doesn't seem it would make sense to bother with changing the title of post, though, unless one also changes the URL with a plugin.
These are all great points to remember! Not long-winded at all either. A great thing you have going for you is your desire to figure out the "why's".
Yes, it definitely is a skill. I always have to ask the "why" questions, otherwise I don't truly get it.
Even after asking the why, when or where, most times I still don't get it, lol.
But that is the adventure of it all!
Thanks!
:)
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Huge help and very clear. Thanks very much.
You bet!
:)