Google’s PR rating – the page rank of your site – is one of the factors that
Google uses for ranking most relevant items when it pulls up a search
engine. Higher PR ratings are considered more relevant, and getting the
highest PR for your site is one of the keys to doing traffic
building.
Google generates its PR numbers by an arcane process that
they don’t reveal, and they tweak the algorithms all the time, to avoid
spamdexing and link farming. Three elements that go into the page ranking
are keyword validity, the number of links that tie back to your page, and the PR
rating of those back links.
We’re going to discuss how
all three of those can be made to work for you, in the context of social
networking sites as we teach our members of the
First of all, we’re going to
look at keyword validity. Because the presumption is that social indexing
sites are rated by and voted on by real human beings, Google’s PR system trusts
social networking sites to give keyword validation. This is in comparison
to assorted search engine optimization plans that result in pages of near utter
gibberish, designed to be read and indexed by web spiders, not human
beings. Remember, it doesn’t do you any good to get on Google’s first
search page results if doing so means that the person reads two sentences and
hits their back button! We realize that’s a heretical position among
internet marketers, but we at the Wealth Magnet
System
believe it’s the absolute
truth.
The second component of PR is how many links feed back to
your site; this gets a little dicey, because there are techniques to build huge
arrays of meaningless back links to sites called spamdexing (an attempt to
artificially boost your site’s rankings by using short term links on places like
Digg to put lots of links back to your site) and link farming (where you join a
network that automatically adds a link back to your site on everyone
else’s). These are pretty easy to filter out, so these techniques (like
badly over-SEO’d text) tend to only be used by cut rate marketers who haven’t
kept their search engine knowledge up to date.
The real trick is to get links back to your site from high PR sites
themselves. Since Google tends to give high PR ratings to pages on sites
like Netscape.com, Digg, and del.icio.us, and they tend to have community
voting, a good article with a link back to your site can generate a few hours at
a high PR rating back link…or, for topics that don’t get a lot of churn in their
discussion, you can get a whole day or so. The reason this is important is
that those front pages of social networking sites have PR numbers of 8 or 9, and
that, applied consistently, will give your site a PR of 4 or 5 right out the
gate. Even their archives have high PR numbers, in the realm of 5 to 7 –
and the links can persist in the archives for months.
This all ties
back to getting multiple links and link relevance through keywords. If
you’ve got good content linked to on those sites, the users get to vote if it’s
relevant. The more positive votes you get, the longer you stay on
that front page “news service” page, and the longer you take to drift out of the
archives. Furthermore, the longer you stay there, the likelier it is that
outside people will both follow the links to your site, and will link to your
site of their own volition…but this gets back to the mantra that content is
king.
It doesn’t matter
how optimized your site it, it has to give people a good reason to come
back. It’s got to build a sense of community and trust, and it’s got to
give the readers valuable information. This is why we at the
advocate things like a multi-part tutorial
with the parts linked in on these sites every second day or so), and giving your
readers blog posts and things like that to comment on. You don’t have to
give away the whole farm, but you do have to make sure that you give enough out
that the people who vote on these social networking sites don’t decide you’re a
spider-bait website and vote you into oblivion. You also need to make sure
that your site’s presence on these pages doesn’t come off as being too overly
commercial. It’s far better to have someone link to your site and say
“whoa, this is cool…”
Indeed, cultivating the “whoa, this is cool!”
referral is the height of internet marketing….and depending on where it happens
(such as slashdot.org) it may shut your site down as you burn two months of
bandwidth in six hours. So be aware of what can happen if this really
takes off.