Do you want to know what the most prominent pages on your blog are, according to Google's PageRank algorithms? There is a way, but it can take an incredible amount of time if your blog isn't organized in way that makes it easy for you.

In my article, WP Plugins: Exec-PHP, Smart Archives, and WP Categories and Posts, I wrote about how you can use these plugins to "silo" your archives and categories. It just so happens that I have two pages (if you look above the first post on this page) that are designed specifically for this purpose.

Using the Visual PageRank Tool from iWEBTOOL and entering the URL for my Extended Archives page, I was shown that page with a pagerank next to each post title.

Why would you want to do such a thing? For two reasons, actually. I'll go into the second detail in a moment, because it's going to be difficult to explain. The first reason is easy: It allows you to see what kind of posts you should focus on. It's pretty simple, really. You should focus on the topics that produce the highest pagerank because that's what most people reading your blog are interested in. Sort of.

The second reason is to attempt to make your better posts get better pageranks. What kind of pagerank do you think you get for a post when no one links to that post? What do you think you get for a post that's linked by another page, anywhere, that has a pagerank of zero itself? That's right, a big fat ZERO. So… how can you make a post get a better pagerank? One way is to do it is to make it have current relevance by referencing it in a new post. It has to have relevance to the article you're writing or you're wasting your time. What happens is that when your new article gains a higher pagerank than the referenced article, the referenced article will gain a higher pagerank. It can happen in so many different ways, I'd be an expert SEO guru if I even tried to understand and explain it all. Relevance is the key.

You might wonder why I even bother to check mine. I mean, I'm really not an SEO kind of guy. But I'm not stupid. If I want to get noticed by the search engines more, then I need a higher pagerank. It's that simple. As I was visualizing my archive links, I noticed that my most popular posts were not all my highest ranked posts. The most popular are ranked by page views. The highest ranked are ranked, of course, by pagerank. My goal should be to make my most popular posts rise to the same level as my highest ranking posts. More higher ranking posts will raise my overall pagerank for the entire website and that will affect the next pagerank update that Google does. It's too late for the current update in progress because even a prolific writer such as me can't write enough to create that much relevance in just a few days. I'll be ready for the next one, though, you can count on it.

A footnote to all of this: So which of my posts did I find out were my highest ranking ones? I won't list them all here, but the blog drive-bys are all ranked high as well as most of my popular posts.

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Blog Appreciation:

I have to hand it to a guy who's typing with one hand lately (pun intended). Jer from nyquil.ORG hasn't been making as many rounds as he used to since the post he brought to you by his right hand. Typing with two hands is hard enough; try doing it with one.