Using search engine marketing techniques to promote your offerings on the Internet gives the best returns amongst all web marketing efforts as per the latest report by Marketing Sherpa.

Google is the global pioneer leader amongst all search engines. Achieving higher rankings in Google for your website or web pages is a smart way of staying ahead of your competitor’s web promotions. Google owes its market leadership to its consistent ability to serve the most relevant web pages for a search query. As it has billions of web pages to search (with many thousands getting added every day), Google has devised its own unique way of attaching importance to all the web pages that its automated crawlers read. Google ranks all the available web pages according to their content relevance with respect to search phrases entered on its Internet search page.

The higher your web page ranking, higher will your webpage show on the (also called natural or organic) search result web pages of Google. The process of improving your natural search engine rankings is called search engine optimisation.

These organic search results are free and extremely popular with most internet users as they tend to trust Google’s choice rather than the advertised PPC ads (also displayed on the first page of Google search results). It’s like getting thousands of dollars worth of free ads in the most relevant trade media vehicles for an industry; whenever a new issue is published!

Google Page Rank Technique
Measuring the relevance of web pages by Google crawlers is a pretty sophisticated process and it depends largely on some basic details of your webpage: the title of the webpage, its content and how frequently popular keywords/key-phrases are used on the webpage.

Google figures out what your webpage is about by reading its content and also looking at other websites with similar content that are linking to your webpages. Good quality and quantity of back links to your website/webpage add to your relevance score as it depicts the growing popularity of your website amongst other web-properties. It then uses proprietary ways to figure out how relevant your webpage is for particular web-search phrase.

PageRank is Google’s unique way of measuring perception of the credibility /quality/authority of individual webpages. Google assigns a number from 0-10 (10 being the best). Google broadly divides PageRank into four categories:
0-3: New websites or those with minimal links
4-5: Popular websites with good amount of inbound links
6: Extremely popular sites having hundreds of links and many of these are high quality links
7-10: Generally highly respected media brands, large enterprises or A-list bloggers.
Now if your web page and your competitor’s web-page do have the same relevance – then whoever has the higher PageRank gets a better search result webpage ranking – thereby showing up at the top of the results webpage. Thus higher PageRank should ideally drive you web marketing efforts.

Estimating Your PageRank
To find out your website’s page rank you have to first download the free Google Toolbar and then turn on the PageRank feature on it. You can even download a free Google PageRank calculator available on some web-solutions company websites. Benchmarking your PageRank according to web search results mapped to well researched key phrases is one method for staying ahead of your competitors.

Our research indicates that boosting your Google Page Rank will not necessarily result in improved rankings.