If you want to calculate Page Rank for your website, you may be confused by the variety of page rank calculator websites you see when you do a search.  Different calculator tools are useful for solving different problems, and this guide will help you understand some of the most common and useful options.  In this guide, you'll learn about several websites where you can calculate Page Rank—both what it is today and even what it could be at some point in the future.

Why Do We Need to Calculate Page Rank?

If you've just created your website, you won't need a Page Rank calculator—yet.  But if you have an already established website, it can be very important to periodically calculate Page Rank.  A page rank calculator helps you understand in general whether your website has been gaining or losing in popularity and authority.

While Google maintains that Page Rank is not one of the most important factors in search, study after study published in academic journals shows that it is.  If you want for your pages to be listed early in search results, you should check your Page Rank with a Page Rank calculator often enough that you can identify any problems or drops in your PR values.

The Basic Page Rank Calculator

The most basic tool you can use to calculate Page Rank is offered by Google itself in the form of the Google toolbar.  If you're just looking for a Page Rank calculator for a single web page—perhaps the home page of your law firm website—you can simply use this toolbar as a quick way to identify the Page Rank value.

Keep in mind that when you calculate Page Rank with the Google toolbar, you'll actually be seeing an outdated version of your Page Rank.  The toolbar is only updated periodically, and you may actually be seeing a value in your Page Rank calculator that is 2-3 months old.  A little later in this guide, we'll explore how to find out what your Page Rank may become in the future when the toolbar updates.

Using a Page Rank Calculator for Link Juice

This Page Rank calculator (https://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php) will help you identify how much link juice will come from each link from a particular website.  Whether you want to know how much link juice each of your web pages will produce or how much juice you're likely to get from an inbound link from someone else's site, this is a great way to calculate Page Rank statistics.

Page Rank Calculator Tables: How Many Links?

Some people want to calculate Page Rank so they can know how many inbound links they'll actually need to move on to the next Page Rank value.  This Page Rank calculator (https://www.fuzzone.com/blog/346/search-marketing/how-to-calculate-your-pagerank/) will help you to know how close you are to backlink success.  If you calculate Page Rank for your website and find that you need 4000 more links to get to the next Page Rank value, for instance, you'll know that you need a great deal of link building if you want to successfully improve your Page Rank value.

Page Rank Calculator Based on Link Numbers

This one (https://www.thinkbling.com/prcalc/index.php) is a little bit more complicated, and helps you to calculate expected Page Rank based on the links you're building.  In order to effectively make use of this calculator, you will need to have the number of inbound links directing to your page that are of each Page Rank value.  To do this, you should first run an inbound link checker on the page, then run a list of these pages through a list-based Page Rank calculator (like this one: https://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/).

Of course, you can also use this calculator even for a website that hasn't been made yet.  By playing with some of the numbers for your inbound links, you can better understand how to quickly raise your levels of link juice.  This Page Rank calculator may be one of the first tools you use when thinking about how to create a realistic inbound linking strategy for your website.

Page Rank Calculator for PR Value Prediction

This tool (https://www.seomastering.com/pagerank-prediction.php) helps you calculate a predicted Page Rank value based on the number of links to your website.  What's interesting about this tool is that it actually gives you a predicted Page Rank value that doesn't take into account any of Google's penalties for over optimization.  If you suspect that your Page Rank may have taken a hit because you over optimized your website, you can calculate Page Rank using this tool and see whether there is a discrepancy.

If there is a large discrepancy between the number you get when you calculate Page Rank using this tool and the PR value your website actually has, there may be several explanations.  However, one of the most likely is that one of Google's algorithms has detected evidence of artificial link structures.  You can get your PR value back in line with the PR value you calculated by deleting the links to the offending websites as soon as possible.

Page Rank Calculator for Future Page Rank

Sometimes, you may calculate Page Rank right now, and you may not be sure whether the Google toolbar is actually giving you the most up to date information.  This tool (https://www.searchenginegenie.com/future-pagerank-checking.html) helps you calculate Page Rank using many different servers.  Because each server is updated at a different time, this tool can help you anticipate an increase in your PR value.

How Often Should We Run a Page Rank Calculator?

You should probably calculate Page Rank for your own website at least every 2-3 months even when you're not making any major changes.  If you're trying a new link building strategy, you may want to use several different Page Rank calculators every couple of weeks so that you can keep a closer eye on the fluctuations that occur as your links go live.

If you are considering downloading a Page Rank toolbar or a page ranking tool, you need to understand your options first.  Law firm marketing professionals have recently started understanding how important it is to track PR values for their web pages.  A Page Rank tool can make it substantially easier to analyze and record the results of your marketing campaigns on your overall web authority.  Let's take a look at several of the most popular kinds of page ranking tools, and go over when they're appropriate for use by law firms in combination with search engine optimization strategies.

Why Would I Want a Page Ranking Tool?

There's more than one reason that a law firm marketer might want a Page Rank tool.  The most obvious reason to install a Page Rank toolbar is in preparation for any marketing efforts with an explicit goal of increasing your website's PR value.  However, there are several uses for any Page Rank tool.  For example, you can use a page ranking tool to do valuable comparative analysis of your website and the web pages of your competition.  You can also use your page ranking tool to understand which pages on your website are doing best and which still have a bad Page Rank.

Some people want to start using a Page Rank toolbar just so they can start to “think” in PR value terms.  It can be hard to understand what traffic and authority level typically makes a website have a PR value of 4 or 7.  After using a page ranking toolbar to search the web for a few weeks, you can see the PR value of hundreds of websites.  This helps you get a feel for the differences, so that you can better understand how to move your website to the next level.

Types of Page Rank Tool

Maybe the first time that you use a page ranking tool, you're not terribly concerned about doing anything heavy duty.  You just want to see in a very basic way what your website is on the 0 to 10 PageRank scale.  Start by downloading the Google toolbar, which contains a simple Page Rank toolbar function.  You can access this functionality by mousing over the Page Rank tool icon in the toolbar.

Another type of page ranking tool can be found on many different web pages—just do a Google search for “page rank tool” to get a good selection of the ones being used most right now.  The most common page ranking tool you'll find is one that will analyze your entire website and detect the PR value for every single page you have there.  This kind of tool is a great way to get a “big picture” view of how your PR value boosting efforts are going and which pages are becoming most authoritative.

Using a Page Rank Toolbar

If you're using a piece of Page Rank toolbar software, you may be able to see a great deal of information on every website that you search for or see.  A page ranking tool can actually give you an overlay detailing search engine optimization information for every website you look at.  This helps you understand not only where you stand with PR values, but where your competition stands as well.

Interpreting the Results of Your Page Rank Tool

You may be a bit surprised by the results of your page ranking tool.  You may have expected that since you perceive your law firm's status as relatively middle of the pack, you'd have a Page Rank toolbar result somewhere around 5 to 6.  In fact, it's likely to be substantially lower than that.  Why?  Because there are many, many more websites at each lower level of Page Rank value than at the next level up.  By the time you get to sites with PageRank values of 9 or 10, you're talking about a short list of less than 100 of the most influential web pages in the entire world.

Even if your Page Rank tool reveals that you're starting with a PR value of zero, don't despair.  All websites start with no Page Rank, and the easiest level to get is the first level.  You can start boosting your inbound link numbers to get your page ranking tool to start showing better results.  Keep in mind that usually, a Page Rank toolbar will have data that could be several days or weeks old.  Any Page Rank tool you use is very likely to be a trailing, not a leading, indicator of your website's authority and traffic levels.

Common Misunderstandings About Page Rank Tool Software

Some people think that by using a page ranking tool, they will actually be able to improve their results automatically with no further effort.  This isn't true.  Just checking with a Page Rank toolbar will do nothing to alter your PR values one way or another.  You need to couple your use of a Page Rank tool with strategies to actually build original content and inbound links, or you will never see your PR values rise.

Even if your Page Rank toolbar shows an upward swing when you use them, you should avoid automatic inbound link creation programs.  That's because Google doesn't like this kind of link building and will likely quash any new link juice coming to you if they suspect you of automating.

Monitoring the Progress of Your Page Rank

If you do nothing to alter the PR values of your website at all, you will probably notice a slow downward trend.  That's because other websites are emphasizing a high Page Rank, and they will be competing against your site for the number of high Page Rank slots.  You will only be able to imporve your performance with continuous effort, which will mean monitoring your Page Rank toolbar periodically.

You should also check online once in a while to see if a new page ranking tool has been released that gives you new functionalities.  An upgrade to your Page Rank toolbar could make a difference to your future optimization efforts, if it makes it easier to compare and analyze your data.

The most recent surveys are in, and Google has come out on top once again in the search engine wars.  Over 66 percent of searches on the internet today are conducted through Google.  If you're trying to improve where your results are displayed when people search for law firms on Google, you need to do a Page Rank check for not only your website, but also for web pages belonging to your competitors and to the people who are sending you inbound link traffic.  In this guide, we'll explore how to check Page Rank and why you should do so on a regular basis.  Keep reading to find out not only how to do a Page Rank check, but also how to improve your PR with the results you get.

What Is Page Rank?

When you do a Page Rank check, you're actually looking at the core of why Google search results were so different from other search engines' results when it was first released.  Page Rank is Google's way of deciding how popular a particular web page is, and this popularity index is put into an integer from 0 to 10.

There are very, very few sites with PR of 9 or 10, and many with much lower PR ratings.  It takes exponentially more work to get to each new Page Rank level.  The higher a web page's PR is when you check Page Rank, the more authority each of its links will confer.  A Page Rank check won't tell you exactly how much authority a page can give, though, because the amount of total link juice delivered is divided among all the outbound links on a page.

Understanding your PR through a Page Rank check will help you make solid decisions about your search engine marketing strategies.  Now, let's take a look at how to actually check Page Rank.

How Do I Check Page Rank for the First Time?

First, some good news: unlike many other types of analytics, you won't need to insert any code on your website to do a Page Rank check.  In fact, you can check Page Rank for not only pages on your own website, but also for any other web pages that you might be interested in analyzing.

Probably the easiest way to do your first Page Rank check is to download Google's free toolbar.  This toolbar will simply work in your browser, and allows you to check Page Rank by hovering over the PR icon.

What Page Rank Check Tools Should I Use?

There's a chance that you'll want to check Page Rank with something other than Google's toolbar software.  For example, let's say that you want to be able to do a Page Rank check as well as checking a large number of other SEO measures.  A toolbar like SEOQuake gives you all the SEO information you need, including a check Page Rank tool, at your fingertips and overlaid on every website you use.

There are also a number of tools for doing a Page Rank check without using any kind of toolbar.  Most of these programs are actually built into websites.  Just doing a Google search for the kind of thing you want to check will usually give you some of these websites—there are many clones and imitators, because making a program to check Page Rank is so easy.  Any of the available tools will have the same accuracy when doing a Page Rank check, so you may want to choose based on the display and other features that matter to you.

Using a Page Rank Check for Pages You Don't Own

If you want to improve your search engine optimization, you should start using tools to check your inbound links.  Then, check Page Rank for the web pages that are giving you these links.  Why?  Because you get the most link juice from high Page Rank links that have high PR values, and you want to know where to try to put your links in order to maximize the return on your link building investments.

You may also want to check up on the Page Rank of your competitors.  When you check Page Rank for your closest competition, you can get a good idea of whether they're overall doing better or worse than you at creating search engine optimized content.  You can then check their inbound linking with your inbound link checker to find new reseources for building links and staying competitive.

How Often Should I Check Page Rank For My Sites?

While Google's toolbar only infrequently updates Page Rank information for websites, Google is actually monitoring Page Rank dynamically in real time.  Generally speaking, you should consider doing a Page Rank audit of all of your existing web pages about once every month.  Checking Page Rank more often than this may give you data that jumps around too much without really telling you what your longer term trends are.

What Do Changes to My Page Rank Mean?

If your page has a higher PR than when you last checked it, congratulations—this means that your web pages are becoming more popular and confer more authority.  If you're noticing that your Page Rank has slipped by a point, it's possible that you're still getting exactly the same number of links, but that the internet has, in essence, grown bigger around you.  Only a certain percentage of websites can have each Page Rank value.

Even if you don't notice an actual change to the integer representing your Page Rank, there's a good chance that the value itself has changed.  Google simply rounds Page Rank numbers up or down to get to an integer, but it is always calculating to several decimal places.  Keep in mind that just because you don't see motion doesn't mean that it isn't there below the surface.
 

If you're reading articles about search engine optimization, PR and Page Rank are terms that come up a lot.  We know what you're thinking: “But what is my Page Rank, and what does it have to do with anything?”  The website Page Rank for your website is actually very critical to how your site does in searches, and this guide will help you become acquainted with it.  Keep reading, and you'll find out not only how to answer your “what is my Page Rank” question, but also how to find the website Page Rank for any site on the web and how to increase your PR value.

What is My Page Rank Used For?

Google uses your website Page Rank for a large number of things.  Perhaps the most important is determining how much link juice gets passed on with each of your links.  Websites with higher PR values start out with more link juice to pass around, and every link on a page dilutes the amount of link juice that it sends to each individual link.  The total amount of link juice you're getting from inbound links is the single biggest determining factor that Google uses to decide where your search rankings should be.

This alone makes it very important for people to ask “what is my Page Rank?” on a regular basis.  What makes it even more important is that tracking your Page Rank can help you understand whether your website is growing or shrinking in traffic compared to the growth of the web.  At any given time, only a set percentage of websites can have a particular PR value.  If your website Page Rank slowly lowers, it's probably because you're stagnating while other people are moving on and adopting successful search engine optimization strategies.

What is My Page Rank Calculated Based On?

According to Google, website Page Rank is based on a huge multitude of factors, and Google engineers are very tight lipped about which factors matter most.  We know that traffic matters, as well as how many links a website is receiving and whether those links come, themselves, from websites with high PR values.

Generally, you can build a high Page Rank website by focusing on contextual, high quality links and original content.  Your website Page Rank will depend in part on whether your content appears to be original or just reposts of things that you have found around the web.  You can think of it like this: higher Page Rank websites are the ones that Google believes people are most likely to find value in.  If you can make your website valuable, your Page Rank will increase.

How Do I Find My Website Page Rank?

Now you're probably wondering: “what is my Page Rank?”  There are several different tools that can help you find out.  The easiest to download and use is probably Google's own toolbar, which is updated only sometimes but can give you a quick and dirty idea of what your Page Rank looks like now.

If your website is relatively new, you may not be able to answer your “what is my Page Rank?” question quite yet.  It takes some time for Google to index new websites and start to assign them Page Rank numbers.  Be patient, and you'll be able to check your PR values within a few days or weeks.

What Is the Website Page Rank of Incoming Links?

If you want to find out the Page Rank of your incoming links so you can tell who is giving you the biggest amounts of link juice, you'll need an inbound link checker program.  Many of these tools now include a Page Rank check as part of the basic inbound link checking service they offer.

When too many of a website's links come from blogs, or from very low PR websites, it's very possible that Google will see this as deserving of an over optimization penalty.  If this happens, don't panic—just ask some of the people who have low PR links to your website to remove them if possible.  Before you know it, Google will stop penalizing you and your website will be as good as new.

What is My Page Rank Saying About My Website?

A PageRank that is increasing shows a rapidly growing website that is managing to outpace its competitors.  Keep in mind that because website Page Rank is a logarithmic scale, it takes herculean amounts of effort to move up in Page Rank once you've already attained a high level.  You may just want to settle for maintaining a PR level.

If your Page Rank level is decreasing slowly, you should step up your SEO efforts.  If it takes a sudden nosedive, you may want to ask Google what's going on—it may be that you have been impacted significantly by a recent algorithm change.

What is My Page Rank Change Caused By?

If you notice that your website Page Rank has changed appreciably since you last checked up on it, there can be several explanations.  One of the first things that you might want to do if you're wondering “what is my Page Rank doing?” is to check up on  your inbound link numbers.  One of the most common reasons for a website Page Rank to increase suddenly is an uptick in viral traffic.  You may have had a blog post or some other content go viral without even realizing it—that's the nature of the viral web world.

If your website Page Rank has dropped precipitously, that is definitely cause for alarm.  Typically, this kind of result comes from being penalized after a search algorithm update.  “What is my Page Rank being penalized for?” you may ask.  Well, that depends.  Have you been automating link building in order to artificially inflate your website Page Rank?  Have you been over optimizing using spam blog comments and non-contextual inbound links?  If you have, Google may see these as violations of Webmaster Guidelines that can be penalized with serious consequences for your website Page Rank.

One of the biggest changes that the internet has brought to the legal marketing world is the lawyer review.  Until websites like avvo.com and Yelp were developed, written reviews were mostly the purview of newspapers and magazines discussing food, art, and pop culture.  Today, more attorneys than ever are using Yelp for business marketing.  In this guide, we'll take a look at how Yelp came to dominate the online review field, and how using Yelp for business marketing at your firm can be one of the smartest decisions you make in 2012 or 2013.

Yelp: Reviews for Almost Anything

If you wanted to get a review for a law firm back in 2000, you'd have had very limited options.  You could do a web search that might reveal a review or two, especially if the law firm had some disgruntled customers, but it was very difficult to know which reviews were at all reliable.  You could also ask friends and family for their own recommendations, but of course this was not a very large sample of attorneys.

Yelp for business changed all of that.  Yelp's business model was very simple: if you allow web users to add their own reviews for any type of business, no matter what was being sold, people would have a single hub to get all their reviews from.  Today, that model is alive and well.  Whether you want to review your local McDonald's or an investment banking firm, Yelp is probably one of the first places you'd think of to do it.  Understanding how to make the most out of Yelp for business marketing is critical to any business where reviews matter—like a law firm.

Getting Started Using Yelp for Business

You may not know this, but even if you're not using Yelp yet, past clients may already be posting reviews about you.  There's no reason to avoid using Yelp for business purposes—the only difference it makes to join the site is that you get to fill out your profile and actually see what people are saying about your law firm.

Creating your profile doesn't take long, but you should still put some thought into it.  Keep in mind that using Yelp for business marketing won't work as well if you're not highlighting your firm's brand in the copy you're writing for your profile.  You should also make sure to use some search engine optimization techniques in what you write about your firm—remember that all of Yelp, including user reviews for your firm, is publicly available and indexed by Google, Bing, and other web search engines.

Maintaining Your Yelp for Business Profile

Once you've created a profile on Yelp, you can't just let the profile sit and hope that users do all the work for you.  Instead, you need to make sure that your Yelp for business profile is up to date for all contact information and any information pertaining to your law firm.  If you're not being careful about updates, you could be losing clients who attempt to use old contact information that is still being broadcast by your Yelp profile.

Getting Your First Positive Reviews

If you don't already have some positive reviews when you start using Yelp for business marketing, you should try to get some as soon as possible.  Even one or two Yelp reviews can vastly improve your conversion rate, and will help you to build your online reputation.

Mention to your clients that if they have been satisfied with their experience, you would very much appreciate them helping you with a solid review on Yelp for business marketing purposes.  You can make this call extend to some of your past clients by posting to your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.  It can be hard to get people to make the initial effort to give you reviews, but the conversion rate increase will be well worth it.

Don't do anything unethical, like asking friends, relatives, or other people who have never been your clients to write fake reviews.  While there are even services that advertise that they will post fake reviews on Yelp for business marketing, this is no way to run your law firm and will be negatively viewed by everyone from potential clients to the state bar if your ruse is discovered.  The same goes for writing reviews yourself, under a different name.

Negative Reviews: How You Can Beat Them

If you get a negative review, don't worry: it's not the end of the world, not even close.  While it's true that negative reviews can significantly negatively impact your ability to get conversions, you have some ways that you can beat negative reviews before they spiral out of control and make it difficult to get new business.

For example, you can use the techniques in the last section to get some positive reviews.  While this won't make the negative review actually go away, it will make it harder to see and will help to balance your overall star review so that people see you as the excellent attorney you are.

But what if you're not sure the complaints were real?  What if you suspect that someone was unethically planting false negative reviews?  The first thing you need to do is talk to Yelp.  This kind of fraudulent negative review happens more often than you might think, and Yelp is very used to dealing with it.  Especially if the person has written no other reviews, or has only given negative reviews to law firms, they may have their account suspended and the review will be deleted.

Doing Competitor Research on Yelp

You shouldn't just stop after you see your own Yelp reviews.  Part of your branding should always be what differentiates you from the competition.  By researching your competitors' reviews, you can see what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong.  You can increase your own conversions by asking clients to emphasize a particular part of your service if and when they choose to write a review for you.

If you're an attorney and you're not already using Yelp, you need to be.  The website now receives over 600 million visits per year, making it the internet's biggest source of user created reviews for services.  If you're a new Yelp attorney, you may need some quick tips to help you get the most out of your Yelp marketing efforts.  This guide will give you the tips that you need to succeed, all while keeping your web presence professional and without resorting to any kind of unethical behavior.

Yelp Marketing Tip #1: Double Check EVERYTHING

One of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a Yelp attorney is to find out that a piece of contact information is incorrect or out of date.  You don't want the next newspaper story about your law firm to involve clients accidentally calling a strip club.  

Keep in mind that when you're using Yelp marketing, the goal is for at least some of your potential clients to see your Yelp profile before anything else about you.  You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and if the first impression a client gets about your Yelp attorney profile is that it is sloppy or incomplete, they will be unlikely to even think about clicking on your website link, much less giving you a call and trusting you with their legal issue.

Yelp Marketing Tip #2:  Watch Your Reviews Frequently

The biggest advantage to creating a Yelp attorney profile is that you will now be notified when you receive new reviews.  If you receive a notification about a review, you should check what the review says right away.

In some situations, you may find that a review of your law firm is not a legitimate review from an actual client.  Instead, it's possible that a rival law firm has decided to get their hands dirty by giving you a negative Yelp attorney review in the hopes of attracting more business to their firm.  This technique is underhanded and unethical, but it's definitely not unheard of.  If you suspect a review has been created by a competitor instead of a client, you can notify Yelp, which will look into the situation and delete the review if it appears to have been fraudulent.

Yelp Marketing Tip #3: Respond Thoughtfully to Negative Reviews

Not all negative Yelp attorney reviews come from rival firms.  Even if you're the world's best lawyer, it's likely that some clients have come away from your office unsatisfied.  People are more likely to write a review when they're very dissatisfied than when they're highly satisfied, which means that sooner or later, you're going to get a bad review.

This is where many attorneys see their Yelp marketing plans fall apart.  Here's how it happens: they see a negative Yelp attorney review, they respond in a defensive or aggressive way, and then more negativity starts coming in.

Remember, a disgruntled client who posts a negative Yelp attorney review has said their piece and is likely to just leave the site alone if you don't respond in an antagonistic way.  Instead of getting defensive, talk genuinely about the problems experienced and how you hope to do better in the future.  Potential clients reading Yelp attorney reviews understand that not every review will be positive—don't make a bad situation worse by showing yourself in a bad light.

Yelp Marketing Tip #4: Actively Solicit Positive Reviews from Clients

If a negative review is one of your first reviews, you may now have a very low star rating—which could drive off potential clients before they even get a good look at your Yelp attorney profile or reviews.  In order to get your star rating back where you want it, consider talking to your current or past clients about adding reviews on Yelp.  Clients are often quite willing to help with Yelp attorney marketing efforts if they've had a good experience with your firm.  You can even use social networks to get the word out to clients if you don't want to make use of email or mailing lists.

Yelp Marketing Tip #5: Stay Off the Astroturf

Don't get people to write positive reviews on your Yelp attorney profile who've never actually set foot in your law office.  This is called astroturfing, a form of Yelp marketing that is used far too often by people in many professions today, but in the legal world, it could actually get you in big trouble with the state bar.

Yelp Marketing Tip #6: Have a Conversion Ready Website

Even the best Yelp attorney reviews will sound unconvincing if people go to your website and it looks like it should be on Geocities, circa 1997, or if it has 3 Flash introductions and a CSS sheet that looks like a programmer's nightmare.  Get professional web design that keeps your website simple and user friendly, so that clients who visit your website can get to the information they need quickly.

Yelp Marketing Tip #7: Keep Your Branding Going

You should make sure that any niche marketing or branding efforts you're working on are also extended to your Yelp attorney profile.  Your Yelp marketing will be much more effective if it's synergistic with the messages you're already sending about your brand through other online media channels, like social networks, blogs, and your home page.  Don't make your Yelp profile so dry and boring that your law firm loses the brand personality you've tried to cultivate elsewhere.

Yelp Marketing Tip #8: Use Critical Feedback

When you get a negative review and say you'll change in the future, make those changes.  In many ways, your Yelp attorney profile can be one of the most useful snapshots you'll ever get of how your clients think about you.  Instead of tuning them out, really make use of their feedback so that you can have better client service (and better Yelp reviews) in the future.  Even in a generally positive review, if you notice a place that your firm could have done better, be responsive to that concern.

A single keyword with a great page ranking in a search can double or even triple your overall web traffic and conversions.  If you want to check the keyword page rank for many of your different web pages and many keywords, you're in for a tedious but potentially very rewarding process.  Checking on the page rank by keyword of your website can make a big difference to your law firm's niche marketing efforts and how you design your website in the future.  In this guide, we'll learn why keyword page rank matters to your bottom line as a law firm.  We'll also take a look at how to find your page rank by keyword so that you can identify your biggest keyword winners and losers.

Keyword and Page Rank Analysis

Both your keywords and your page rank are very important elements of how your website is ordered in search rankings by Google.  By analyzing data about keyword and page rank statistics with your website, you'll be much better equipped to find new sources for inbound links, build a niche marketing website, or even find a new niche to move into.

For instance, let's say that you discover that you're actually getting a very large number of hits for searches for real estate law in Denver.  In reality, you're working mostly on estate law, rather than doing mortgage closings.  You may want to consider expanding your practice to make use of the high page rank by keyword that you have for the search term.  Your keyword page rank has become more and more important, because nearly 9 in 10 people who want a new attorney start by searching online first.

What's more, in most cases, those people won't search beyond the first page for their keywords.  So if your page rank by keyword doesn't put you onto the front page, you're missing out on a truly gigantic amount of potential business.

Analyzing Page Rank By Keyword

There are dozens of different tools online that will allow you to analyze Page Rank by keyword.  One of these tools (available for free at https://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html) makes it possible for people to check not only their own keyword page rank, but also the rankings of their competitors for the same keywords.

One advantage of this particular search tool is that you can also check your page rank by keyword for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Some keyword page rank checkers only work for a single search engine, and you'll find that your rankings can be quite different depending on what aspects of your search engine optimization you've worked on most.

Even if your search for page rank by keyword reveals that you have several good keywords in the top five results, it's not time to rest on your laurels.  Remember, your competitors have access to the exact same kinds of information that you do, and can check your keyword page rank just as easily as you can.  You need to make sure that you're continuing to build high quality inbound links so that your competitors don't overtake you and end up with better page rank by keyword.

Checking Keyword Density

Another thing that you may want to check while you analyze keyword page rank is your keyword density.  If you have found that your page rank by keyword is extremely low for most words, have you considered that you may have “flooded” your text with the same word over and over?  If Google identifies that you've used the same keyword or keyword phrase more than about 2% in a single webpage, it's very likely to actually change your ranking negatively.

This is because in the earlier days of the world wide web, one of the most common tactics for people to use to increase their keyword page rank was to use a keyword dozens or even hundreds of times.  Today, those tactics don't work any more.  You should try to aim for a keyword density of about .5% to 1.5% to make sure that your page rank by keyword is at optimum levels for any keyword you choose.

Finding Keywords You Rank High On

Unfortunately, there's no good way to query Google to ask which searches your website appears early in.  There are almost certainly a lot of different search strings where your website appears as the #1 result, but there isn't some sort of search table maintained by Google that can readily identify this information.  For instance, any long enough string from your original content is likely to trace back only to your website and websites quoting it.

Perhaps the best way to find which search terms are actually being used by real searchers, and for which your website appears high in the rankings, is to look at your inbound traffic.  Using Google Analytics or any other analytics solution will help you identify which of your links and search engine terms are bringing in the most users on a long and short term basis.

If you have one keyword that seems to bring people to your website more often than any other, use that term in the search tool above.  You'll then be able to find out your keyword page rank for those keywords, and can slowly start to make your way down the inbound search traffic list provided by Google.

Tracking Your Page Rank By Keyword Over Time

This tool (https://www.whatsmyserp.com/serpcheck.php) provides not only the ability to monitor your keyword page rank today, but also to be able to look at how your SERPs have changed historically.  Having this information is critical to establishing a trendline so you can see how you're doing in relation to your competitors.

Keep in mind that ideally, you want for your search results on Google to be in the top 10, which puts your website on the front page of results.  The top 3 results are even more commonly used, so any time you have extremely high SERPs, make sure that your website is designed with content that can anticipate the needs of people searching for that topic.

If you're interested in buying a new domain name for your website, you have to be wary about all of the scams out there.  One of the most pernicious scams is the artificially high Page Rank domain name.  This fake page rank scam affects hundreds or even thousands of enterpreneurs every year—don't be its next victim.  Keep reading this guide to find out how a fake page rank check tool can save you thousands of dollars, and how to check fake page rank well in advance of making any final purchase decisions about a domain name.

But I Thought Page Rank Couldn't Be Faked!

Page Rank is designed to be a true measure of popularity for websites.  Because it is defined by Google and Google alone, you may think that there isn't a need to do a fake page rank check.  After all, why check for fake page rank if it's not really a problem?

The truth is, though, that page ranks can be faked through a rather simple scheme called a 301 or 302 redirect.  This kind of redirect makes Google think that the page rank value of the domain name you're buying is actually the same as the page rank of the website that the redirect goes to.  This page rank could be either higher or lower than the page's actual PR value, but in the typical formulation of this scam, the 301 or 302 redirects go to a website with a very high Page Rank.

Why does it work like this?  Because 301 redirects designate a website that has permanently moved to a new location.  Google allows this kind of redirecting so that websites can make permanent domain switches without having to worry about their Page Rank value declining precipitously as a result.

This means that it's actually critically important for anyone who is buying a web domain to do a fake page rank check so they can be sure that they're actually getting what they pay for.  Even if you're buying from someone you believe to be trustworthy, it doesn't take long to check fake page rank, and it's completely free, so you're not out anything just from checking.

When Should I Do a Fake Page Rank Check?

Generally speaking, it's a good idea to check fake page rank any time you're offered a high PR domain name.  If the domain you're being offered has a Page Rank of 3 or less, you may not feel that it's as important to do a fake page rank check—after all, even if the real Page Rank value turns out to be slightly lower, it won't be too big an ordeal to bring it back to the PR level you were told the site was.

The more expensive the domain name, the more critical it is for you to run the fake page rank check before making any financial commitments.  Check fake page rank through several different sources to make sure that you're getting the best information possible, and that the tools you're using are working correctly.

Will My Own Page Rank Ever Be Fake?

If you ever decide to sell your own domain name, you don't need to worry about running a fake page rank check on it.  It takes actual purposeful effort to create a false PR value, and while you can check fake page rank on your own website before selling it, you're very unlikely to come up with a positive result unless you deliberately ran redirects on your front page.

If someone tells you that your website has a fake PR value, you may want to run a fake page rank check on it to make sure that they're not telling the truth.  If you check fake page rank and discover that they were not telling the truth about your website, now you'll have a way to actually prove that you have behaved ethically.

Fake Page Rank Penalties

When blogs have a relatively high Page Rank value (PR of 5 or 6, typically) but Google has identified them as selling blog entries or guest posts, Google may perform a fake page rank check of its own.  If Google's check for fake page rank reveals that you've got a lot of inbound links coming in from sources that are very suspect, they may decide to artificially reduce your Page Rank value.

After a check for fake page rank indicators like artificial link structures, in 2012 Google actually made a large number of search engine optimization blogs have a Page Rank of 0, regardless of what their link numbers indicated the PR value should actually be.

Fake Page Rank Check Tools

There are literally hundreds of tools available to check fake page rank online.  Because Google changes the way that programs can access Page Rank values on a regular basis, these sites and tools often don't stay in the same place for a long time, or a tool that worked a few months ago may not work now.  The best way to find fake page rank check tools is to

If Someone Tries To Sell You a Fake PR Domain

Let's say you run a fake page rank check and find out that someone is trying to scam you.  Unfortunately, there's no one consolidated space on the internet that helps people find which sites have come up positive in a check for fake page rank.  You will just have to trust that other people will also check fake page rank before they purchase domain names that have fraudulent redirects.

Check Fake Page Rank For Inbound Linking Sites

You should also consider making sure that the websites linking to you don't have a fake page rank.  Check fake page rank of any site that is giving you inbound links so that you can make sure their links won't suddenly be worthless when their fake page rank comes to an end.

If you've got accounts on any social media websites, you may already be a part of some online profile directory.  Twitter is the newest website to get onboard with the profile directory craze.  They recently released online profile directories allowing users to browse accounts, and Google has already indexed over half a million pages from this directory alone.  If you're interested in getting into online profile directories and getting the most out of them, you need this guide.  Keep reading to find out which online profile directories are worth being a part of, and which ones you can safely ignore.

What is an Online Profile Directory?

When you become part of many web communities, you'll be asked to set up some kind of profile at the time of registration or afterward.  Online profile directories gather publicly visible profile information into a single resource for ease of browsing, indexing, and searching.

Some of the most commonly used online profile directories include the directories for Yahoo, Google+, and Twitter.  While there's no reason to join one of these websites just for its online profile directory, the directories do make it substantially easier for people to find you, and make your search rankings higher.  This is because profile directories increase a website's total number of Google links, which in turn makes their links more prominent and easily searchable.

Seeing Which Online Profile Directories Your Competition Belongs To

One of the best ways to see which online profile directory is considered the gold standard in your area is to check to see which ones your competitors belong to.  Try searching Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook directories to see if you can find the people you are in competition with.  You may also want to run an inbound link checker on competitor websites.

When you run an inbound link check tool, you may find that your competitors belong to several online profile directories that are exclusively for the use of attorneys.  These are extremely useful tools, and if your competitors already belong to this type of online profile directory you need to hurry up and join it as well to remain competitive.

Should We Be Listed on an Online Profile Directory?

Even if your competition hasn't yet gotten to some of the most popular online profile directories, you should probably start.  Having this important leg up on your biggest competitors can make it much easier to be seen before they are in Google and Bing searches.

However, not all online profile directories are equally prestigious or equally useful.  You should probably make sure that other professionals are using any online profile directory before you decide to have an entry in one—otherwise, you could end up part of a directory that is primarily used for websites that are less professional looking, and ending up in this kind of bad company can actually hurt rather than help where your pages appear in search results.

The questions you should ask yourself before getting a listing with an online directory service are these: have we heard of this directory before?  Is it a directory in common use?  Does it have a relatively high Google Page Rank?  Does it seem to have a large number of spam websites?  Does it accept just anyone, or is it more selective?  If you've never heard of a particular online profile directory and it accepts all profiles, you may want to be wary—this is often an indicator that a website is more about generating artificial links than helping users find the online content they want.

Which Online Profile Directories Are Popular?

When it was originally introduced, Google+ was supposed to be one of the biggest online social networks and online profile directories on the internet.  However, not every online profile directory attains the level of fame and value that it was hoping for, and the clunky interface of Google+ meant that it was only used by tech-oriented people and those who liked to be on the cutting edge of internet communities.

Instead, the most common online profile directory for attorneys to belong to is the LinkedIn profile directory.  Facebook follows rather closely behind (and may someday have more attorneys than LinkedIn, especially as consumer-focused legal practices continue to proliferate).  Yahoo! and Twitter also offer relatively frequently used online profile directory systems.  You should, if you can, be a part of all of these directories.

You should also consider becoming part of any online profile directory that is very popular with other attorneys in your area.  People go to directories where the most relevant results are.  If you have a state or local bar association that offers you the option of being included in this type of directory, you should probably do it, even if it costs some nominal fee.  However, any other type of directory that charges you to use it should be considered suspect—most general, rather than professional, directories will never charge such fees in 2012.

How Do We Find Which Online Profile Directories List Us?

Of course, in some cases, you may already be listed by an online profile directory—or even more than one.  For example, if you've got a Facebook profile, you're already searchable.  If you want to know whether you have been listed in a particular website's directory, you should consider doing a site specific search.  Typing “site:[sitename]” into Google, without the brackets and replacing sitename with the actual URL you want to find search results in, will help you to narrow down your search so you're just looking for directory profiles.

What SEO Strategies Work In Combination with Directories?

Because some of the biggest online profile directories are part of social network websites, it makes sense that one of the best strategies you can implement to augment your directory listings is social networking.  If you're not already actively participating in social media, now is your chance.  Make your online profile directory listing count for something—get active.  Start posting, responding to posts other people have made, and keeping discussions alive.

According to Google, search engine page ranking actually depends on millions of total factors.  Your search engine Page Rank is a number from 0 to 10 that gives you a rough approximation of how popular you are in comparison to other pages all over the web.  This guide will help you understand why search engine page ranking is so important and how to improve it in the way most likely to be recognized as acceptable by Google.

A History of Search Engine Page Rank

The idea of search engine page ranking was actually not part of the first search engines.  These search engines tended to work by serving up results based on keyword densities and website traffic only.  This meant that websites could very effectively game the system by putting the exact correct keyword density into their content, and immediately have a result that was among the top results for a search.

Google was a project initially designed to deliver smarter search results to web searchers.  Instead of just looking at how often keywords appeared, Google decided to use a new idea called a search engine page rank.  This meant that the search engine actually looked at how many other websites were linking to a site, and used that popularity measure as the main way of deciding which results should be served to users first.

Search engine page ranking delivered significantly better results to web users for a long time, catapulting Google into a dominating market share and causing other web searches to update their algorithms to include similar measures.

How Search Engine Page Rank is Calculated

If you are new to search engine page ranking, you might think that it's done on a linear scale—that is, that there would be about the same number of websites ranked 2 as websites ranked 3.  However, this is not how search engine page rank values work.  Instead, search engine page ranking is a logarithmic scale.

Current best estimates from studies around the web show that each page rank level requires approximately nine times the number of links as the level beneath it.  This means that if you have a certain number of links and just managed to make your website become PR level 3, you'll need to have about nine times that number of links before you can expect a PR of 4.

Of course, Google has also had to deal with a number of people trying to optimize their websites using any means necessary.  Because of this, an update called Google Panda actually took away the “link juice” of certain types of websites that had been abused to provide huge numbers of inbound links to low quality content.  If you're engaging in this kind of linking strategy, your search engine page ranking may be substantially lower than your number of backlinks would initially suggest.

How Much Impact Does Search Engine Page Rank Have?

It can be surprising how much impact search engine page ranking has.  Because your search engine page rank is a pretty good estimation of your level of inbound linking to a page, it is approximately 70 percent correlated with your overall SERPs.  If you've got a very low search engine page ranking, you can expect that your search rankings will be much lower than similar websites with higher page rank values.

Google likes to say that Page Rank doesn't actually mean anything to search results, but this seems largely to be a calculated move designed to make sure that people don't focus too much on building their Page Rank at the expense of quality content.  What Google likely means is that Page Rank only means something when it's used in conjunction with original content and a diverse range of link sources.

Improving Search Engine Page Rank: What to Do

In order to improve your search engine page ranking, you can start building new inbound links.  It's a great idea to use social media sites to help with this, because these sites let you get out the word to your closest friends, family members, neighbors, and colleagues.  These are the people most likely to give you backlinks without requiring anything at all in return.

You should make sure that you're building your links from as many different websites as you possibly can.  Too many backlinks from the same IP address are suspicious to Google and can start actually having a negative effect on your search engine page ranking.  It's also a good idea to make sure that the links you are building have a very wide variety of anchor text.  Identical anchor text is an almost surefire sign of artificially built links—in natural link structures, very few links are actually based on exact keyword matches with SEO keywords in the article.

Improving Search Engine Page Rank: What NOT To Do

In your efforts to improve your search engine page ranking, make sure that you don't try to build links from phony blogs, or use phony reviews to pad out anything negative that people might see in your search results.  This isn't just unethical, it's also very obvious.

You should also avoid any type of automated link building programs.  In all honesty, these programs simply aren't sophisticated enough yet to avoid detection in the long term.  While you may see a short term burst to your search engine page ranking, in the end it's very likely that you'll be penalized and will regret having used automation instead of building content through organic links.

The Future of Search Engine Page Rank

As Google becomes more and more advanced, the quality of links is going to matter more than their quantity.  Google has already made significant strides toward this ideal in 2012 with its Panda and Penguin updates.  In 2013, we can expect to see similar reactions to the loopholes that are currently being exploited by search engine optimization professionals.

In order to avoid your links becoming a game of whack-a-mole in which Google holds the mallet, you should focus on creating links that are actually good enough to withstand the test of time.