PageRank Does Not Equate To Traffic

A lot of people seem to be focused on building their Google PageRank for their sites without understanding that PageRank does not equate to getting traffic. It is fairly easy to get a new site to have a 4 or 5 page ranking within 30 days. But even with a PR5 ranking these sites are not guarranteed to recieve tons of traffic.

So, how come a PR5 ranked site not recieve very much traffic:

1. Pages are not optimized for the right keywords. It doesn't matter how high a pages PR is, if it is targeting keywords that nobody searches for.


2. The "anchor text" of incoming links does not target the right keywords. A lot of webmasters ignore the importance of using "anchor text" correctly.


3. The "anchor text" of internal links is not keyword optimized. A lot of sites out their just use general text like "home" or "articles" as the anchor text for these important internal links.


4. Site has landing in Google's Sandbox for its main keywords. This can happen to new sites that are targeted to popular keywords. There is nothing that can be done to remove a site form the sandbox, except waiting for it to come out naturally.

The good thing is that it is easy to correct the first three problems.

I have to admit that I have been guilty of jumping on the PageRank wagon over that last two months. Currently, I now have two PR5, and 8 PR4 sites that have all been built since January, and none of them are getting the traffic that I expected.

So, I am currently optimizing the sites to target the right keywords (ones that people search for) and have modified the "anchor text" of internal and external links to support these keywords.