This is an evidence-based approach to SEO. The research discussed in this video has been presented on EzineArticles.com.
Let me begin by giving a very brief summary of my research, and the resulting conclusions. Extensive analyses of the top positioned webpages on Google results pages for hundreds of keywords, were undertaken. It turned out that five facts must be recognised together to understand that PageRank is the best guide available to us to determine keyword difficulty, the chance of a website competing successfully for a keyword.

I have a website www.2women's health.com, that is one of the leaders in its category with more than 2 million visitors annually. More than two years ago, in 2008, it was observed that on occasions, some of my top pages would be dropped by one position for a period of weeks and then recover. I began to question why it should be that this drop and recovery occurred.  Invariably, the web page that was pushing my web page down was on a newspaper website.

I decided to analyse these newspaper webpages to see how they were beating my top positioned pages. So let us look at this example page in more detail. invariably the web page that was pushing my webpage down was on a newspaper website. I decided to analyse these newspaper webpages to see how they were beating my top position-pages.

This is the page. It appeared on the Telegraph, which is a top United Kingdom newspaper, and it reached top 10 positioning for the keyword 'thyroid problems.' This is a most desirable keyword, with more than 1.3 million competitor pages and 201,000 searches each month globally. This page has 0 PageRank.
I analysed the page with Internet Business Promoter and also Rank Tracker. For on-page factors, the scores were very low. I looked at the backlinks to the page with AllTheWeb and there were just five.

All the major SEO experts have been agreed that PageRank is irrelevant in SEO, because a top positioned web page can have PageRank zero and this was the case for this article in the Telegraph. But this page had the very low scores for on-page factors, very few links and the PageRank of 0. So how can we explain the top positioning of this web page?

It seemed to me that Google was saying that this article must be important because it was on a major newspaper, But how can Google put this into their algorithm? It occurred to me that perhaps Google was using the PageRank of the HomePage of the website and, for the Telegraph, this proved to be 8.

So, is Google telling us that PageRank of the HomePage is Google's view of the importance of this page?



This is an output from my program Keyword SEO Pro. Analyses showed that with very, very few exceptions, internal pages that were in the top 10 positioning for competitive keywords with PageRanks of 0 invariably, had a corresponding HomePage PageRank of 3 or more. Keyword SEO Pro highlights pages that are HomePages by colouring the cell pink. The page in position 1 is a HomePage, and it has a PageRank of 0. The left side of the table is the PageRanks of the HomePages and that should be 0, which would be totally out of keeping with its competitors.

It became apparent that Google is giving a PageRank boost to HomePages that are competing for a keyword. Further analyses lead to the Keyword SEO Pro internal algorithm which adds 4 to a maximum PageRank of 5. For pages with HomePage PageRanks of 0 or 1 we add 4 giving 4 or 5 respectively. HomePages with PageRanks 2 to 4 increase their PageRank up to the maximum of five. A HomePage PageRank of five receives no addition. Video 12 in this series explains this calculation in greater detail.