How Google PageRank affects my search engine rankings and traffic

It has now been just over a month since Google assigned my blog with the PageRank 4. There is a lot of discussion about what exactly PageRank is and how exactly it affects blog rankings in search engine results. I have now collected some analytics data and will try to show how the increase in Google PageRank affected my blog traffic and search engine rankings.

New blog = Google PageRank 0

From 25th October, when I started my blog, until 31st December, when Google assigned me with PR4, I only got 121 visitors from search engines. That was 1.22% of my total blog traffic in that period and majority of this traffic was on searches for either my blog name or my domain name.

From PR0 to Google PageRank 4

On 31st December Google had a PR update and assigned me with page rank 4. From 31st December until January 8th nothing much had changed. I still got sporadic search engine traffic only.

But on January 8th I suddenly got 30 visitors from Google in one day. Since then the search engine traffic has been steadily growing. In 3 weeks since January 8th search engines have sent me 1420 additional visitors. More than 96% of these were from Google and traffic referred by search engines had a 10.86% share of my total traffic in January.

My top 10 keyword phrases

Majority of traffic I get at the moment contains keywords and keyword phrases very close to my domain name. 6 of my top 10 keywords are closely related to my blog domain name and blog title:

• how to make a blog
• how to make my blog
• make a blog
• blogging ideas
• make my blog
• howtomakemyblog

This shows me that it is very important to chose a domain name which contains relevant keywords or relevant keyword phrase to your topic. It will help you rank higher as Google places huge significance on the domain name and keywords in it.

The long tail of blog search traffic

In January Google sent me 1490 visitors via 1019 different searches and keyword phrases. The best working keyword phrase brought only 100 visitors so this definitely shows the power of the long tail keywords. Here are some examples of keyword phrases that brought me visitors from Google during January:

• how to grow your twitter followers
• how to increase page rank of my blog
• go viral on twitter
• how do i get ideas for my blog
• insert ads between wordpress blog post
• step by step how to build a blog on wordpress
• getting traffic via stumbleupon
• how to add a subscribe to in my wordpress blog
• how to approach potential advertisers for my blog

I may not be able to rank top for the highly-popular but highly-competitive keywords, but if I have a lot of articles with a wide range of relevant keywords, and get a couple of daily clicks for each, I will have a healthy amount of search engine traffic daily. The long tail in action!

How to optimize the PageRank effect

If you have PR0 you cannot do much other than build unique content and attract high-quality and relevant links with good anchor text. Writing guest posts on other blogs is my recommended way of doing this. Keep working on it consistently and Google will notice you.

If Google has already assigned your blog with a PageRank it may not automatically help you rank higher but there are several things you can do to optimize the effect of an increased pagerank on your rankings for the different keywords:

• Follow the rules to keyword optimize your blog posts
• Do proper keyword research when writing blog posts. Having a PR4 means that I can compete for lots of different keywords so by including wide range of keyword phrases in my content I stand a fairly good chance of ranking high for long tail keywords
• Optimize PR juice. Now that my main page has PR4 I can use that page rank authority and transfer it to some of my articles by optimizing the link juice flow on my blog
• Interlink the blog content with a good internal linking structure to make the content that you want to be ranked for easily found by search engines

Conclusion

I hope this article shows you that it is possible to get traffic from Google and search engines, even if you have a young blog and even if you are in a very competitive niche. Focus on getting quality links to your blog and focus on writing quality content, and you will soon experience an increase in pagerank and search engine traffic.

Image by: Husin