SEO Is More About Traffic And Money Than Rankings

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

I found this article online about 10 SEO tips. I found the tips themselves a bit overdone, though useful. So I won’t belabor them. But I did particularly like one thing the author said:

I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3’. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN.

This quote strikes at the heart of what a lot of people online are misinformed about. PageRank is simply a measure of a website’s trust. It isn’t an indication of how successful your SEO is. You have a PageRank of 8 or 9 and have crappy SEO. You can have a PR of 8 or 9 and not be making any money from your website. Too many people are sucked in by the illusion.

Consequently, a PageRank of 2 or 3 doesn’t mean a website owner isn’t meeting with success either. How old is the site? If the site has only gone through one PageRank update since it was started then it’s rather unfair to hold the PageRank against it. Even if it is several years old, a low PageRank is not an indication of lousy SEO. Recently, Google penalized sites that sell links and their PageRanks dropped. It could happen to anyone.

Many website owners make a good living from selling links or ads on their websites. If they have sufficient traffic to their websites then they could certainly get by with selling links. It’s a viable business model simply because link buying, selling, and trading is a great way to attract new targeted traffic. If you do buy or sell links, be sure to stress the traffic generating benefit as that is really what you are selling. If you sell PageRank then you will likely be penalized. But that is a digression.

There is one tip made by this author that I’d like to point out:

You don’t need every page on your site listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo: you only need one. So maximise your efforts on that one page. Visitors that page will then visit the rest of the pages on your website, and so will search engine spiders, so you know that every page on your site will be listed and with a chance of being found in a search.

That’s a good point, and one you don’t hear often. All you need to really succeed online is one very successful web page. All the other pages of your website can piggyback off the success of that one page. SEO is more than just trying to rank No. 1 for every page you write. In the end, it’s all about driving traffic and monetizing.