I've been stuck on a rating of PR2 and can't seem to get it higher. I seem to come up high on certain searches outranking my office and even the corporate site. So I guess the question is, does PR really matter?

Also, why would Google show me as being linked reciprocally to less then 20 websites while MSN has me linked to almost 200?

Any ideas or comments would be helpful an appreciated

--Jim
http://www.flwaterhomes.com

>I've been stuck on a rating of PR2 ... does PR really matter?

Yes, for gathering inbound links as webmasters / site owners will be more apt to offer you reciprocity.

>why would Google show me as being linked reciprocally to less then 20 websites while MSN has me linked to almost 200?

Google (plural) doesn't report all your links, why should they, doesn't help them a whit.

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As a counterpoint I would say PR might be important. It all depends on your marketing and business stratagy.

If the search engines are your primary source of traffic to your site, then PR is very important. You should follow good pratices for increasing your PR score. Increase the number of sites linked to you, list your site in various directories .....

However, if traffic from search engines is secondary then PR is less important. There are many methods of driving traffic to a website and a balanced approach is often the best. Increasing PR is great but its cost needs to be balanced so that it does not prevent the use of other methods. Most realtors get 90% of their customers with 50 miles of thier business. So advertising your website on local media may have more impact than google traffic. When designing your advertisements, make your website a point of focus. Put your web address on your property signs and business cards. Make all your clients know your webaddress. My point is balance in advertising.

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Neal M
Jackson MO Real Estate, Cape Girardeau Missouri Real Estate, Cape Girardeau Real Estate
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Hi Neal,
Your points are valid. My area of SW Florida gets a lot of lookers from out-of-state and out of the country so I am relying heavily on the search engines to generate business. I am happy with my results so far. It seems that just within the past month I'm starting to make an uphill climb on the search engines. I do very well on google and msn. I'm also getting a lot of traffic from the google ads. I just don't understand the correlation between page ranking and the way I am positioned on some search terms. I come up on page 1, position one or two on a lot of search terms that I was careful to build into my web pages. So it seems I have a lot of relevance. With these good results, I just continue to wonder if it's worth the effort to try and increase the page ranking. Will this improve my positioning even more? I'm getting 1 or 2 good solid leads a week and if I can increase it then I'll expend the effort.

--Jim