A link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

The name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares in Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.  Read more

By far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimization initiative. Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the most optimum performance keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. It's like not being able to reach your destination even after running your best race because you started out on the wrong road.  Read more

More and more search engines rank your web pages based on the number of links that point to your website (link popularity). Google uses link popularity as its most important factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi, and others also use link popularity in their formulas.

Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other websites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings. Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a website among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index.

Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help to define a site's reputation. The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them. Read more

On the web, a keyword is a reference to the content and/or the type of meta element included in a given web page's HTML code to aid in the page's indexing. A keyword meta element may include several comma–separated keywords (or keyword phrases, each of which may contain several individual words).

Looking back to the 90s, the search engine crawlers were relatively poor in terms of analysis capabilities, and, thus, the meta keywords were a simple way to detect the topics of a page. Historically, it has been the first way to optimize for search engines, however, no major search engine today claims to read the keywords which has raised the question of whether they are still needed at all.  Read more