Got PageRank?

During our initial phase, the key marketing tactic for ToursbyLocals.com is to drive traffic through our site, primarily through online means.

You can do this at no effort by buying 'pay-per-click' ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (these are the 'sponsored results' you see at the top or side of the page after you type in a search term.

For example, if you type the search term 'private tour iceland' into Google you'll likely see our ad either on the top or right side of the page. If you click on it, you'll go to a special landing page all about our iceland tours. These are the 'pay-per-click' search result and you'll cost us about $0.50 if you click on our ad.

But if you click through 2 or 3 pages of search results you'll find the same URL. These are the 'organic' search results and clicking them is free!

Free is good.

The problem is that very few people will click even 1 page into a search result so if you want visitors to your site, it is critical to get listed on the first page.

So how to do that? There are a lot of important elements to consider, but one thing that makes your whole job easier is to achieve the holy grail for search engine marketers -high Google PageRank.

This is Google's estimate of how 'important' your page is. When we first started started tracking ToursByLocals.com on November 8, 2008, it had a PageRank of 0.

After sticking at 0 for 6 weeks, my Christmas present was to see that it had finally registered and is now at 2! This puts us within striking range of the top PageRank sites that we compete with on various terms. Since my main activity over the past 6 weeks is to get as many sites as possible to link to us, I credit that for the improvement.