Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : Is it all about page rank?

[WeSellServers]

Hello Everyone,

Im not much of an SEO expert and i was curious on peoples opinions, Getting a website to PR2-3 is quite simple and doesnt require much effort, Afew posts and articles in the right place and abit of social book marking and your half way there, My question is with a sales-based industry like web hosting or dedicated server sales is investing in a page rank important or would your money be better spent placing it in PPC type advertising eg AdWords and Yahoo ?

Main point being with web hosting and server sales the main keywords are so bogged down your never going to see the first 3-4 pages of Google without heavy investment, So how would you lay out of SEO and advertising campaigning for such a company?

[zionchild]

SEO is the winner in the long run and it is cost-efficient. People have more tendencies to click on search results than on sponsored links found in search results.

[ElTino]

Originally Posted by WeSellServers

Is it all about page rank?

Personally speaking It is not about page rank at all! It's about helping people and solving their problems. That makes these same people come back to you again and again. And then eventually these people will help you climb the SE ladder.

Let's say you have a PR 10 site. All is done via Black Hat methods. No valuable content, nothing of help to people and served to an audience that is being interrupted to see it without even requesting such resources. Not good at all. This is not a way to build reputation.

There just isn't an easy 10 steps way to make things happen the way you want it. The three words, steps or whatever you want to call it in order to succeed are - work work and again work.

Page Rank, what is that, you have to serve people not some ranking system created by the search engines. Focus on helping and solving problems. That is what counts!

That is my opinion!

[TravisST]

You should target a bit more specific niche. I rank highly for less competitive keywords. I've also found that you still need to try and target some that are fairly competitive or you will never recieve the traffic you are looking for. "web hosting" is simply too competitive though and probably even a bit too broad to be considered a good key phrase to target.

I've done all of my SEO personally and have never purchased any services. It is possible!

Page Rank has nothing to do with your SEO though.

[zionchild]

The problem is that there is so much hype and obsession about Page Rank and thousands, if not millions, are led to believe that building traffic and getting loyal site followers are under the baton of PR brouhaha.

[Jamie Harrop]

My PageRank dropped from 5 to 4 a few months back. Then I started receiving twice as many visitors from search engines as I normally did.

As a company, we launched a lot of smaller 'mini-sites' not too long ago. They have a PageRank of 3, and all of them achieve page 1 and page 2 rankings for a lot of competitive phrases.

You can conclude your own lessons from those two stories.

That's all I'm going to say, as I've said my piece a lot of times. In short PageRank isn't as important as it once was. There are far more important factors to invest in, such as on page SEO.

[ianjw11]

Pagerank doesnt really matter that much, especially since it only updates every few months.

[MrCat]

SEO through SERP ranking would work out best.

Traffic and conversion you get from them should be your main focus - high PR doesn't guarantee either.

[everity]

Originally Posted by ElTino

Personally speaking It is not about page rank at all! It's about helping people and solving their problems. That makes these same people come back to you again and again. And then eventually these people will help you climb the SE ladder.

Let's say you have a PR 10 site. All is done via Black Hat methods. No valuable content, nothing of help to people and served to an audience that is being interrupted to see it without even requesting such resources. Not good at all. This is not a way to build reputation.

There just isn't an easy 10 steps way to make things happen the way you want it. The three words, steps or whatever you want to call it in order to succeed are - work work and again work.

Page Rank, what is that, you have to serve people not some ranking system created by the search engines. Focus on helping and solving problems. That is what counts!

That is my opinion!

I strongly agree with this opinion.

[ElTino]

Originally Posted by everity

I strongly agree with this opinion.

Thank you for the support!

[eskwire]

When I first started working with websites I paid lots of attention to PageRank. Now I only use PageRank as a guide.

What really counts to me are conversions, the next important factor is number of pageviews/visits.

Hope this helps!

[1boss1]

In hosting word of mouth power outstrips any meaningless green smear in your toolbar.

[pickaweb]

Page rank no longer matters too much.
It is best to not get too obsessed with it.

[Melnel]

Originally Posted by WeSellServers

...

Main point being with web hosting and server sales the main keywords are so bogged down your never going to see the first 3-4 pages of Google without heavy investment, So how would you lay out of SEO and advertising campaigning for such a company?

How would I lay out a campaign for such a company?

First of all I would carefully research the actual keyphrases that real live customers who may buy your services are using and then look at the top five sites to see how much effort will be required to rank for each term.

Then make a judgment on a few high traffic terms to rank for:

There are 149 million pages targeting the term web hosting and the #1 site has an estimated 70,000 links indexed by Google - a tough nut to crack.

But there are other terms with decent traffic and which are manageable.

Next build a site to target your chosen keywords, get all your pages indexed and then start to gain relevant anchor text links to your site - SEO friendly directories are a good place to start IMO.

If you need immediate traffic consider a short term adwords campaign.

If it all seems a bit hazy and difficult hire a good SEO who is within your budget and let him get the rankings for you.

[GotWebHost]

I'll take a #1 SERP over a PR7 any day.