Last night, Google has passed out a little page rank love with a recent update to kick off the new Google caffeine (bigger, faster, smarter) search engine initiative.

Google PageRank Update December 2009

For many of you engaging SEO, this is the time where quality trumps quantity and lean and structured siloed websites built on the solid semantic premise of context and coherence are outranking link laden behemoths who relied purely on off page ranking factor alone.

Vacillations in search results are typical, but the main thing to remember is it’s all about exposure and conversion. With that in mind, consider the more pages you have ranking for a broader array of keywords, the more long-tail, mid-tail and ambient traffic you can attract.

The more traffic your page rank for, the more opportunity to segment that traffic to a conversion funnel exists. Exposure is indifferent; it’s all about timing, impulse and emotion when it comes to search, but positioning plays a significant role in click through rates.

Deep links (links to individual pages) are critical in distinguishing your content in contrast to the countless websites that overlook building or acquiring links to pages “other than the homepage” and is a prerequisite to creating a strong online presence.

To rank well, all a page really needs is (a) to receive links from the primary navigation (b) to be close to the root folder (c) to have a few contextual links (links surrounded by relevant copy) to each specific page with the keywords it intends to rank for or (d) to have 3-5 deep links from other websites with relevant anchor text.

If a site concentrates on any of those 4 fundamental pillars of search engine optimization, the results when compounded are phenomenal. Page rank is not an indicator of page strength as much as it is an indicator of inclusion.

So, don’t lose sleep over a gain or loss of a few green pixels. The thing to remember is, rankings are by the page, and before you can rank, getting in the index is imperative. Therefore, think of the page rank metric as a method to determine how well your site architecture is structured, and use it as a blueprint to get more link flow deeper in a site.

Eventually those internal pages that pass link flow and have page rank are like an internal dynamo. The more cylinders you have to work with, the more you can segue that ranking credit when you need it to a new site segment, subfolder or subdomain to increase relevance and rankings when you need it.

-Jeffrey

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