Skillett.com

.!.

Mine’s 2 on this site (PageRank that is)……. Or it is today, it could all be taken away tomorrow on the whim of Google (or any other strange random factor!?).

Styletime “Tweeted” me an interesting question on Friday evening:

Why do people still care about pagerank?

I immediately batted back a reply:

Honest truth, I think it’s the only non-woolly measuring stick they’ve got

I’ve thought about this some more since then, and I still think I cracked it in that quick reply….

People want to be able to measure success, they need a yardstick – in life it’s their usually job, their car, their house etc. On the web what have they got?

Secret Nuclear Bunker ruler

As Styletime pointed out to me, he’s got a site that has a PageRank of 6, but it has an Alexa rank of 29 million (incidentally whilst I don’t have a PageRank of 6, I do have a n Alexa Rank in the 800 thousands) .

He’s quite right, Google think his site is great (well a PR of 6 is quite reasonable!), but if you’ve not got people reading it (or buying from it), what’s the point? It’s like living in your huge mansion with 16 beautiful cars in the garage – but not seeing anybody because you’ve locked yourself behind a high security fence!

Becoming Number 1

SEO firms may guarantee you number 1 position on Google, that’s great – but what for?

If it’s for the name of your product that’s great (providing people know what your product is and are searching for it!!!), if it’s for something really random that really isn’t so great for the £2,000 you’ve just spent on getting there!

Let me give you an example:

  • I rank number 2 for the term Skillett today – that’s good – that’s really good and I’m quite pleased about it.
  • I rank Number 1 for “remedy advertisement” what’s the point in that? I confess I did go and check which post it was, it was an important Health Questionnaire.
  • I rank 15 for the term “rachel gets fruity” that’s quite an interesting one too!

This is all good, as I’m not trying to get ranked for anything really! But if I was promised number 1 position on Google I’d want to be there for “Keiron Skillett”, not “remedy advertisement”.

How can we measure “Web Success”?

I did a little “Googling” of my own on this topic, and didn’t find a real answer that satisfied me, many people say it’s all in the statistics (most commonly provided by Google Analytics these days), they measure success on:

  • Unique Visitors and Page Views
  • ROI

True, these both indicate some degree of success, but you’d struggle to find out your competitors stats wouldn’t you? So what are we left with?

Two yardsticks:

Where do you measure up? Do you trust these yardsticks – or do you have your own measure for determining your success on the web?

Creative Commons License photo credit: LoopZilla