How important is Google PageRank for traffic: Or how to take a piece of traffic pie?

Traffic is the moving spirit of every successful website, it is the tool which actually makes website to "come alive". But how to take a piece of traffic pie when there are so many hungry bellies? People often believe that Google PageRank is one of the most powerful traffic drivers. I agree PR is a notable factor for higher traffic, but I consider it more like a prerequisite which should be fulfilled to increase a chance to get higher traffic. There are other more important traffic drivers.

Let me start with one short example:
I often compare the importance of PR for the traffic to the importance of university for getting a dream job. Many people graduate a university to get a dream job with high salary. But the academic title itself will not guarantee you your dream job. It is just one of many prerequisites which have to be fulfilled to get an opportunity to apply for the dream job. But there are many other applicants with academic titles who apply for the same job. If you want to get that job, you have to be better than the rest of applicants. With the PR it is the same there is a huge number of websites with the high PR in almost every niche, to get the traffic you have to be better then the rest of websites.

Does “better” stands for better PR?

No, I would say there are other factors which are much more important for website traffic. Actually I have seen many websites with PR 1-2 which have steamrolled (in terms of traffic) websites with PR 3 or 4. So what really makes that difference?

I think the key factors of high traffic (which are according to me more important than PR) are:

• wide well written content

• frequent updates

• well selected keywords

• appropriate usage of keywords in articles*

* Note: I focused on blogs I am not sure if these factors are that significant for common websites as well.

Why are these 4 factors more important than Google PR?

Wide well written content
People search for useful content and not for high PR. It looks like Google knows that, therefore there is no wonder to see many low PR blogs on the first search engine pages (SERPs). Blogs with wide contents will be probably indexed for many different keywords that mean more traffic also from different niches.

Frequent updates
Google prefers blogs with lot of new unique articles in front of rarely updated blogs (although they might have higher PR). As the result often updated blogs appear in SERPs much higher no matter what PR they have.

Well selected keywords
A blog might has high PR but if it is focused on wrong keywords (which are not often searched in search engines) there will be probably just small website traffic. On the other hand the possibility of getting traffic is much higher if you focus on keywords which are often searched, no matter the blog PR.

Appropriate usage of keywords in articles
It is important to use keywords in the beginning of articles. But don’t scarify reading impression by over usage of keywords. Also it is good to use keywords in the last paragraph of articles (I heard Google spiders sometimes crawl website from the bottom). If you use your keywords properly you will be indexed high in SERPs. And again, no matter what PR you have.

If you want a proof take a look at the picture below:



My blog is very new and has zero PR. Despite of that Google.com displayed my blog in the first SERP (note that there are 79,800,000 other results). And first SERP often means higher chance of getting traffic.