Google Page Rank, does it really matter?

Google hasn't updated its PR on the tool bar for some time now, I know "its updating constantly" but most of us aren't seeing any changes. There's been rumours flying around for some time that PR will get the kick and go all together, Google however say this is not the case, they simply wont be updating the PR tool bar as often as they have in the past.

Does Page Rank really matter though? Many web masters and SEO's treat it as the bible, sometimes clicking through websites judging quality solely on PR, by the time Google updates it's PR its already out of date and old news and is not updated again for 3, 6 or even 9 months, in addition to this page rank does not determine a sites quality only the URL quality and technical aspects, so if a website gains some good natural high quality back links soon before or after a PR update and attracts large amounts of natural traffic this wont be taken into account until the next update months away, so just looking at the current PR is in no way accurate.

I still look at a sites PR on first landing, its a habit I cannot get out of, but these days I tend to dig deeper using a combination of other tools and my own judgment to to help me decide weather or not a website/URL is worth getting some link juice from, or how hard will it be to knock off the top spot, how many inbound links does that URL have? are the linking sites any good or are they just full of low quality none relevant content oozing spam?  One of my clients has a website with a PR4 and when they first came to me they didn't rank for any of their key phrases or keywords regardless of their healthy PR4, and many of their competitors websites showed PR0 but ranked way above them. Google really doesn't want people seeing PR as the judging factor and who can blame them, after all people have become very good at manipulating page rank.

On page SEO the basics...

On page SEO is making sure that your website is search engine friendly and can be crawled by the search engine spiders, although on site SEO is only the beginning of ranking in search engines its still a very important factor that many people (including web designers) forget about.

• Make sure there is only 1 version of your home page
• Make sure each page has a unique and relevant title tag
• Make use of page description tag's
• Make sure there is only on version of your website 301 redirect all non www. URL's to the www. ones or vice versa.
• Proper use of H tags on page headers etc...
• Write good content, including keywords (make content appear as natural as possible, avoid keyword stuffing)
•   Try to write descriptive URL's, for example yourdomain.com/describe.php rather than yourdomain.com/product.php?cat=169
• make sure all internal links are complete URL's
• Always use ALT tags (research shows that search engines even look at the original file name so try to save your images with a descriptive title like web-munki-logo.jpg rather than 001.jpg)
•  Use relevant anchor text for internal linking within your sites content.
• Make sure your code is valid.
• Make sure your site has an xml site map and submit it to Google using the web master tools, this will help ensure Google and other search engines crawls your websites pages. Also linking to pages internally using text links will help crawling so try to link to each page at least once using descriptive anchor text.

good search engine optimisation is made up of many small factors, and remember every little counts!