Use Google toolbar for do-it-yourself SEO
Posted March 23, 2009 – 11:30 am
If you enable the Google Page Rank indicator, the Google toolbar is a handy tool for do-it-yourself search engine optimization (DIY SEO). I recommend it for anyone who works with a small business website, an online media site, or a blog who wants to understand and improve their site’s search performance.
The Google toolbar is simple to install and works with Internet Explorer and Firefox. For some reason, Google’s own browser, Google Chrome, does not support the toolbar, nor does Apple’s Safari browser.
Click this link to download Google toolbar. Once you have downloaded and installed, you will see the new toolbar appear in your browser near the top.
The part that is relevant to DIY SEO is the ‘Page Rank’ feature. This feature may not be enabled automatically. To enable the Page Rank indicator, go to: Options > Tools > Page Rank. Enable Page Rank by checking the box.
Click here for detailed instructions for enabling the Page Rank indicator, including a short video.
Once enabled, you will see a new part of the toolbar that shows a short horizontal bar with a down arrow to the right. The bar uses green to indicate the Page Rank of web pages – more green equals higher Page Rank.
If a web page you are visiting has a Google Page Rank, this bar will indicate what that Page Rank is. For instance, if you go to the home page of a popular site like Yahoo.com, you will see the bar turn mostly green. If you mouseover the bar, you will see text pop up that says the Yahoo home page has a 9/10 ranking (at least it did as of this writing).
If you go to a less popular website, like maybe your own site, you will see less green and lower Page Ranks. Many web pages have no Google Page Rank, so the bar shows no green at all.
In addition to the green bar, the Page Rank feature has a down arrow just to the right which offers several choices when you click on it. For DIY SEO, the most important of those choices is the ‘Backward Links’ option. If you click on this, you will see a page that looks like search results, except these aren’t search results. Rather, this is a list of other web pages that point to the original web page.
For instance, if you go to the home page of SearchEngineLand and check the backward links, you will find that 7,170 other pages link to this one page (as of this writing). That is a huge number and it contributes to the relatively high Page Rank of 6 that the SearchEngineLand home page has.
What is Google Page Rank?
Much has been written and said about what Page Rank is and how it works, etc. Click here for a quick overview about what Google Page Rank is. ‘Page Rank’ is frequently abbreviated ‘PR’ – as in ‘that page has a PR 3′.
The extra short short version of Page Rank is as follows:
Page Rank is a metric that Google calculates which tells you how important a web page is on a scale of 0 – 10 where 10 is the best. It is very, very hard to get a 10 – and most websites for small businesses, web publishers, and bloggers will be lucky to get above 5 .
Page Rank is one of two major factors used to determine where, or if, a particular web page will show up in search results for a given search term.
The Page Rank of a given web page is thought to be heavily influenced, if not largely determined by, the Page Rank of other web pages that point to that page. In a sense, these ‘inbound links’ (which are called ‘backward links’ in the industry) are a kind of vote for the page. If a lot of highly ranked pages point to a given web page, then Google infers that that web page is important and deserves a high Page Rank.
In addition to Page Rank, ‘relevance’ is the other major factor used to determine where, or if, a particular web page shows up in search results. Relevance is determined by assessing how well the actual content on a web page matches up against the keywords being searched for. If the relevance is high, then the page will tend to show up higher in the search results.
For two web pages with about the same content (i.e., the same ‘relevance’), the page with the higher Page Rank will show up higher in the search results. For two web pages with the same Page Rank, the one with the more relevant content will show up higher in the results.
Crucially, a page with low PR can easily show up higher the search results than a page with high PR IF it has more relevant content. In other words, if you have a website with low Page Ranks, then the key to your success in DIY SEO will be to create pages with higher relevance.
Either way, knowing web page PR for your website and others using the Google toolbar is a helpful tool for successful DIY SEO.
