6 Ways to Boost Your Computer Businesses Website Pagerank & Land More Leads

Take the best performing websites on Google and pit them against, well, pretty much the rest of the competition. The consistent differentiating factor between websites that sell themselves and ones that are merely paperweights on the web is a term which has no clear definition. It’s a vague title for a complex algorithm, or math equation, that ranks all websites depending on a variety of factors to determine where they sit in the Google-sphere. This invisible yet important factor is known as Pagerank, and it can make or break a website in the long term as far as Google is concerned.

I don’t call myself an SEO (search engine optimization) expert because I am anything but. I don’t intend to write about keyword sculpting or the “mindset” surrounding how to interact with potential clients through a good computer business website (which Bryce covered in a post here). However, as someone who routinely helps customers get their websites fixed for improving Pagerank, I do have a few words to say about this dynamic topic. The rules of the game are constantly changing, and those who push the “limits of legitimacy” are being watched by Google and eventually penalized.

How does all this apply to someone who runs a computer business website? Seeing as Google has pretty much taken over as the de-facto standard in place of the local phone book, where you sit in relation to the competition is a fairly big deal now. People used to game the phone book system by using company names that start with an “A” or “AA” or similar. That’s all useless now. Pagerank is the elusive “pie in the sky” formula which tells Google how relevant you are for every search done on its site, and more importantly, how close your site lands to the top of the results heap.

A few main things determine your Pagerank on Google at any given time. While Google doesn’t explicitly outline the rules surrounding Pagerank formula, these are what most SEO experts have come to agree on:

1. How many external websites link to yours and how reputable are they

2. How many websites link to the ones that link back to you, and how reputable are those sites (and so forth down this logical chain).

3. How “good” is the content that your website serves (a mixture of many variables, described below in more detail).

For the sake of an example, let’s take a search string that is very important to my computer company FireLogic: Park Ridge Computer Repair. On my Google results, I’m hitting 5th place from the top which isn’t bad, but ideally I want that top spot. Cross reference what search string would be most relevant for your computer business and you can try a similar test. If you aren’t landing as highly as you’d like, it’s likely costing you customers. How much business is being lost is anyone’s guess. The best thing the owner of any computer business could do for their website is to ensure that they are following some basic rules of thumb, in order of what I believe are the most important first (from experience, of course).

1. Quality, organic content is always king. Your website is useless to potential clients unless it is crisp, concise, and built mostly from content which you can claim ownership in creating. The highest ranking websites routinely have a strong correlation with how original and how much quality content they are built on.

While very few computer businesses will ever run the virtual kingdoms that giants like Microsoft operate, it’s still not hard to see how they manage to manhandle search results: they publish vast amounts of excellent original content that is routinely linked back to by other big websites due to the quality and relevance of the information. Don’t resort to the easy way out and merely outright copy from other good websites – Google will easily read between the lines and demote your website appropriately.

If you can incorporate a blog of some sort into your computer business website to help foster original content, this will be a huge boon for bumping Pagerank. The same goes for creating original content for other well known websites like YouTube (my FireLogic channel is a good example) or Facebook as well. Google’s spiders create logical connections between your content on these sites and your own web address, increasing relevance and inching up Pagerank.

This point also goes all the way back to your individual business website sub pages as well. For example, if you have a Services page describing what you offer, don’t just cobble together massive lists including every keyword that you can think of. This isn’t seen as quality content to Google’s spiders; it will likely not get linked by any other decent website; and it will hurt your Pagerank in the end, defeating the purpose of the site which is to garner leads – not toss them away.

2. Backlinks are great as long as they are within reason and appropriate. Too many websites I consult (computer business sites being no exception) fall victim to the notion that “any and all backlinks are welcome and beneficial.” This simply isn’t true. Some web developers are a perfect example of this: they love to plaster their website address onto the bottom of every client website they build. While this may work in their favor for a portion of the sites they create, a good majority of them will do nothing but turn on the red flags for Google’s spiders that the website trying to promote itself is partaking in some level of “backlink spamming.”

There are many excellent ways to maintain quality backlinks. For example, my company FireLogic got listed on my local town’s virtual business directory for residents. It also maintains links on the Google Marketplace from my Google Apps services, as well as on this fine website of Technibble. These are considered highly relevant and applicable backlinks that are tied to websites which pertain to the line of work my company is in and have a clear, identifiable purpose for hosting my link. Link farms and other shady ways that some overzealous SEO experts push their expertise are doomed to fail eventually as they do nothing but over-inflate Pagerank from garbage backlinks.

Many companies that advertise themselves as “Black Hat SEO” specialists do nothing other than dump your website address onto dozens and dozens of useless placeholder pages on the web. They even claim to up the ante by mixing in buckets of keywords that relate to what you are trying to increase your Pagerank on, or listing out all of the locations or zip codes you service. These techniques are short term wonders and will do nothing for your long term Pagerank. As in the story I linked above, Google is constantly scouring their search engine for such backdoor techniques that flood the web with trash.

3. Don’t try to target every keyword you can think of. Judging off a good majority of my competition’s websites, they tend to fall victim to this easy mistake.

Dedicating either your homepage or a collection of sub pages on your site to mixed and matched keyword jumbles (along with zip codes) will not get you a better Pagerank in Google’s eyes. This is gaming the system, and you’ll soon be penalized and pushed back in the result ranks. Use Bryan’s advice and find a few combos that suit your needs and target those appropriately within your organic pages.

4. Use Google Analytics to keep tabs on what your visitors like (and dislike). Success breeds success. This goes for different websites and it can also apply to pages within your site. One of the best free tools Google has ever released for website administrators is Google Analytics. This online tool, with some simple setup, can give you the scoop on what pages of your site are most popular, how much time is spent on each page, and a host of other metrics.

Use this tool to your advantage and research what is and isn’t working on your site. The more you cater your company website to the needs of visitors and rebuild/remove pages, the more eyes you will get, and the better Pagerank you will carve out.

5. URL structure and a visible Sitemap are hidden gems. It’s no wonder why all the best websites on the web format their site structure with clean, formal naming of any pages that host content relevant to visitors. Google’s spiders rank websites with good structure much higher than “dirty” ones which don’t take a second thought to this. And it’s not like you really have to work that hard to keep a clean naming system for your site’s pages. All the popular website platforms today, including WordPress and Google Sites, make page naming extremely easy.

Be careful, however, as while they attempt to suggest the best possible site names for pages, they aren’t always accurate. Avoid page URLs that get cluttered with keywords; that get nested way too deep within useless subdirectories; or which are too short and don’t describe a page’s content. This website does a great job in describing proper URL structure.

I won’t delve too far into Sitemaps or what they do, as Google explains the positives about it here, but know that they are an easy way to boost Pagerank effectively. Sitemaps enable Google’s spiders to crawl your company website with ease and find out exactly what your website has to offer, head to toe. The easier the ranking engine has in trolling your website, the better off you will be. Some sites that do not offer a sitemap may be ranking far lower than they believe – and it’s such a simple item to fix, you really can’t say I didn’t tell you so.

6. Stay away from Flash or keep its usage as minimal as possible. Let’s face it: for any computer business website, when in use, Flash is either not implemented professionally or merely put in place to brag about a skill clients could care less about. Flash is not easily indexed by Google, it slows down page loads, and at worst cripples accessibility for mobile devices (such as most Apple products today besides the MAC). If you can’t get rid of Flash entirely on your site, slim it down to only a few elements or pages you need to focus on (outside of the Home page).

It may sound outdated to say this in the year 2011, but Google’s spiders are optimized for ranking websites that still are highly text and plain-image driven. There are many explanations for this, but the simple technical reason behind it is due to the fact that text and images are more easily categorized for Pagerank variables than dynamic content like Flash. Besides, Flash is not as quickly modifiable as a text & image driven website which leads to stagnant content. In the end, it’s a Pagerank degradation that slowly drowns your site further down the results scale. Remember, what Google can’t organize and sift through it merely pushes towards the back of the heap, and this translates directly into a lower Pagerank.

There are some good resources beyond what I covered above. For those interested in a more decisive reading on what Google considers “good SEO” you can download the official PDF that was released by Google titled Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The PDF goes into detail about the techniques that Google advocates for website structure, content, and other matters related to website development.

And finally, for anyone who wants to check on the closest tool which gives a close resemblance of your website’s Pagerank, this website claims to provide just that. While Google does not officially publish pagerank itself for websites, this service claims to cull various information from scattered Google search servers to give us its best approximation of this elusive rating. Take it with a grain of salt at best, but it’s a useful starting point to see where you stand.

If you have further insight into how to make a computer business website shine when it comes to Pagerank, please post it into the comments section below.