What's a good column without a bad pun for the title? Answer: a better column.

We're going to geek it up a bit this week and take a look at canonical URLs, subdomains and "PageRank". Those terms may be foreign to you, but if you want your site to show up near the top of search rankings, then you should get to know them.

These terms all fall under the broad umbrella of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is the practice of designing and developing your website so it will be seen higher on search rankings.

When you type a search term into Google or Yahoo, they return a list of web pages that that they believe are the most relevant to the terms you are looking for. By understanding how they do this, we can help set up your site to show up higher in the search results, and this draws more traffic. So before I explain how to create canonical URLs by eliminating subdomains so you can consolidate PageRank - or even what that means - let's look at how the search engines generate their listings.

How it Works

Explaining every detail about how it works would require much more space then this column provides and a PhD - which I do not possess. The brief version goes like this: Google indexes every page on the web it can find. This means that it has "bots", or computer programs, that do nothing but go from link to link, saving every page on the Web they can find. From this, Google builds a "cache" on the web. If you want to see Google's cache of a web page, when you search for a term there will be a "cached" link under every search result. Click on that to see the version of the page that Google has saved.

Now that Google has a copy of every webpage, it does two things with this information. These are the two main factors in SEO. First, Google looks at the content of the page to see what text is there - analyzing what it believes the page to be about. You can affect what Google sees with content optimization - a relatively simple task that I will explain next week.

Second, Google looks at the relationship of a single page to every other page. This is determined by linking. The basic building blocks of the web are text and links. Every time you link to another page on the web, you are essentially vouching for that page's content. You are telling visitors, and therefore Google, that you think the page you are linking to is worth their time. You are "voting" for this page.

So, Google ranks pages and sites on the internet according to the votes they receive. However, not all "votes" are equal. If a site is linked to frequently, then its outgoing links will be worth more than average links. After calculating the amount of links each page receives and the worth of those links - each page is assigned a "Page Rank " that is Google shorthand for its relative importance on the web. (Note: this is an oversimplification of how Google ranks pages - there are many other factors involved that I don't have time to get into here.) You can view your sites Page Rank at one of the many Page Rank Checkers available on the web. For instance AllAccess.com has a Page Rank of 6 (the scale is from 0 to 9). 6 is a very high page rank and reflects the fact that All Access is seen as important by the rest of the web. The vast majority of pages on the internet have a Page Rank of under 2. Anything over 4 indicates that your page has a fair amount of important inbound links.

When you type in a search term, Google checks its cache to find all the pages that have those terms on them. Then it ranks them according to Page Rank, keyword weight and a bunch of other factors and spits out a page of the top 10 webpages that it thinks you are looking for.