Applied Vitals

On this day in history, appliedvitals.com achieved a PageRank of 2. Two on a scale of ten isn’t really all that monumental, but I’m trying to make a point.  PageRank—assigned by a Google algorithm to indicate a web page’s popularity—is an indicator that some site owners obsess over and, at the same time, others are completely unaware of.

appliedvitals.com PageRank timeline
4/03/10: PR 2
1/16/11: PR 3

Want to check your site’s PageRank? http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

I believe PageRank is worth keeping an eye on as one measure of your site’s performance. It’s not the only measure to watch and can be completely independent of your actual success.

When a site is managed correctly however, its PageRank will often reflect pretty accurately the traffic and exposure that it’s getting.  And after all, its traffic to the site that presents the opportunities to sell gear, get racers registered, promote sponsors, educate or delivery whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish with your website in the first place.

Among adventure racing sites and others on the topic of fitness, adventure and training, I see many that are clearly unaware of PageRank, search engine optimization and the various moving parts that help to position the site for exposure.

While PageRank is a measure of site popularity, SERP or search engine results page represents the keyword relevancy for a page. For many sites, search engines represent a major source of traffic.  Therefore, keeping your eye on where your site pages are returned in searches is a great idea.

For example, I search for “palmetto swamp fox adventure race results” in the Google search engine and my article Palmetto Swamp Fox Adventure Race Results is returned on page one, second in the list (at least today – results are continually changing based on the search algorithm).

So then, how do you improve your SERP placement? Now we’re talking about SEO or  search engine optimization.  First we need to have an understanding of how a search engine determines if you’re page is more or less relevant for a keyword(s) than other sites’ pages that also contain the same keyword.

I’ll write more in-depth on the topic in a follow-up article, but will say here that it’s based on both internal and external factors.

Read my articles on Blackbaud’s NetWit’s Think Tank blog: A Recipe for Search Engine Visibility and A Recipe for Search Engine Visibility: Part II

Internal SEO factors include, web page structure, accessibility, content and content orientation.  External SEO factors include, links to your page from other sites, the anchor text for that link (is it “click here” or the exact keyword), how relevant is the referring page for the same keyword(s) and how popular is that site – what is it’s PageRank?

So we’ve come full circle in the discussion.  It’s nice to see Applied Vitals’ step up in PageRank.  It tells me that it’s gaining in popularity – for what that’s worth.  But it’s not a mystery to me on how or why it has improved, given my link building efforts and attention to search engine optimization and SERP positioning.