| Search Engine Optimization and Google Page Rank |
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In the summer after my first year of Undergraduate Computer Science, I worked at a company that was interested in getting their webpages ranking higher on Google's search results. The following are my learnings about Search Engine Optimization and Google PageRank: The position of a webpage on Google search results is based on Google's Trademarked PageRank algorithm. The higher the PageRank of a page, the higher it is displayed on Google search results. One of the most significant aspects of the PageRank algorithms deals with the backlinks coming into a webpage. PageRank counts the volume of backlinks coming into a certain page. This is calculated by counting the number of relevant links from respected pags. Relevant pages are those that share a common theme with the page that they link to. Respected pages are those that have high PageRanks, themselves. The more backlinks a webpage has from relevant and respected pages, the higher it's PageRank will be. Quantcast is a website that assigns ranks to webpages based on criteria similar to Google's PageRank criteria. It follows that a page that has a reasonably high rank on Quantcast will have a similarly high rank assigned by Google's PageRank, and will therefore rank high on Google's search result page (when a user searches for the relevant keywords). Therefore, to boost the PageRank of a given webpage, it is important to create backlinks to it from pages that have a high Quantcast rank and share the same theme. In the final stage of this two month project, I wrote a program (in the Python language) that compared the company's webpages to URLs that result from Google's search results based on the relevant keywords. The program then suggested the top webpages to create backlinks from in order for the company's webpage to rank higher on the Google search result page. After these suggestions were implemented, the company's webpages ranked significantly higher than before. |