Measuring PageRank has been the sin of many a webmaster and novice SEO since search engines began indexing pages and Google began offering a snapshot of PR. However, there are a number of reasons why your PageRank is unimportant to your efforts and there are also many other more beneficial data sets and statistics to follow that will help improve your SEO and track your performance.

Toolbar PR

The toolbar representation of PageRank is updated approximately once every three months, although recently this has become much more sporadic with many months passing between some updates. This means that at any given time, the toolbar PR offered by Google could be up to six months out of date and that is a long time in an SEO campaign. In any other form of marketing, businesses would reject the use of figures that were six months out of date.

Relevance And Keyword Use

Another problem with tracking the PR of a website is that while it plays some small part in determining your ranking it fails to consider factors such as relevancy and keyword use. A page with a PR of 9 or even 10 will never rank for irrelevant keywords although they may perform extremely well for those keywords that they do target. Improving your PageRank is by no means a guarantee of improving your search engine ranking or, more importantly, the level of traffic you receive from the search engine results.

Targeted Traffic Levels

The entire aim of SEO is to develop a source of targeted traffic. As such, the most beneficial figure to track is the amount of traffic that you receive from Google and the other search engines. Improvements will be easy to spot and you will almost certainly be quick to identify any drop in results. Your own website metrics or raw logs should provide all the information that is required including the search engine that sent visitors to your site as well as the search term that visitor used to find you.

Conversion Rates

SEO is geared towards the driving of targeted traffic. Targeted visitors will spend longer on your site, visit more pages, and will have a higher overall conversion rate than very general, less beneficial visitors. Track your general conversion rates because this will identify areas on your own site that can be improved but also track the conversion figures for your SEO generated traffic. This will help to identify whether or not you are using adequately researched and relevant keywords. Targeting the wrong keywords can be just as damaging as not targeting any at all.

Tracking Relevant SEO Data

The art of SEO requires the tracking of a good amount of data, and the most effective SEO services will typically ignore the toolbar PageRank offered by Google because it does not offer genuinely useful information. Track the number of links a site has, the number of search engine visitors, and the conversion rates for those visitors in preference to an out of date numerical representation of your link count.

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