Recently, I was amazed about the amount of talk in the internet business world related to the latest Google page rank update which sent many business owners seeing their page rank decrease and also their organic search engine results. 

Over the last couple years, Google has made some serious strides at the tricky ways that are being used to beat its organic search results.  With Google, it is getting harder and harder to unnaturally influence your website’s organic search engine raking. 

The latest algorithm change in Google, downgraded the page rank and organic search results of sites that were selling link.  These websites that were selling links saw their page rank go lower and also their organic search results while many of the sites playing by Google’s rules saw their organic search engine results improve. 

Did you see your site’s page rank decrease?  My answer is who cares?  Page rank should be the last thing you should be worrying about in your business.  Sure it would be nice to have a high page rank, but in building your website’s organic search results there are so many more things you need to be concerned with.  In short, don’t waste time worry about page rank, especially the inaccurate page rank specified on the Google toolbar.

In building your online business, it is much better to develop a plan of action to make your website improve in the organic search results without just focusing on one factor like page rank.
 
Here are a few tips to get you going with improving your website’s organic search results:

1. Follow your expertise. Following your expertise is much more important today than every before.  With advanced algorithms like Latent Semantic Indexing, it is important to be an expert in your chosen market.  If you are expert you will naturally intertwine related industry words and semantic equivalents into your content.  This will help your website’s content appear very natural which is critical for the next evolution of organic search engine ranking.

2. Plan your site out before developing it. Without a doubt a good layout for your website can improve usability.  In planning out your site make sure you do thorough keyword research and break these keywords into common themes.  Then categorize your content by these themes.  By categorizing your content and site’s design into themes you will be way ahead of most of the sites on the web and positioning your website to rank in the organic search results well into the future.

In addition, a well planned out website will see a much lower bounce rate which is a key metric many search engines are tracking today.  A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or the percentage of visits in which a person left your site from the page they entered from.  Your website’s bounce rate shows the visit quality and thus a high bounce rate generally indicates that your sites entrance or design aren’t relevant to your visitors.

3. Build QUALITY link reputation. Joining high quality directories and partnering with other high quality websites in your industry will significantly improve your organic search engine results. These days the quality of your links is much more important than the quantity of links.  Joining the high quality directories online can create a huge boost for your organic search engine ranking.  Here are the top directories I recommend as critical:

• DMOZ.org
• Yahoo Directory
• Starting Point Directory
• Librarians’ Internet Index (LII)
• Joe Ant
• Chiff.com

Also, partnering with other high quality websites in your industry will help you build on the theme of your site and pass lots of link reputation.

4. Build tools on your website.  Building online tools on your website is a great way to get others in your industry to link to your site.  These links will look very natural which is a critical component to improving your organic search results.  One example of tools is the comprehensive list at Seo Chat.  For your website dig into your market and look for opportunities for tools that will add online value.

5. Frequently updating high quality content.  Keeping your website’s content updating frequently is a critical component of your organic search engine ranking strategy.  Look for recent news or other interesting fact in your market and create unique content that expands on it with your expert knowledge of the market or industry you compete.  This expert knowledge and viewpoint you provide will help give people a reason to link to your content driving deep links into your site.  Deep links are critical for organic search engine results.

6. Research your competition. Checking out your competition is a very important step in improving your organic search engine results.  Take a look at their site and see what is working and what is not. If possible, try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.  Look at who your competitors are partnering with and see if you can leverage a content sharing partnership with the same partners. 

7. Repetition is the key to victory. Building a solid business process for your website’s search engine optimization strategy will help ensure your success.  Focus on defining these processes so that you can easily repeat them and transfer them to future employees or interns.   Document the processes or even better record a video using Camtasia.  This way as you hire interns or new employees you do not have to spend tons of time training them.  You simply have your intern or employee watch the video that highlights all your search engine optimization processes and then they are ready to get to work.  Mastering repetition in your business processes can have a profound impact on your business.

In the end, taking a broad approach at getting organic search results will improve your sites performance much better than just worrying about page rank.