Unwarranted Zeal in the Quest for High PR and SERPs

[greeneagle]

Recently there have been a number of posts in different forums alluding to the need to discuss the relative importance of CONTENT vs PR and SERPs. Given the different types of Sites, and importance of all design and promotional components this is a difficult topic.

But I guess what is most difficult for me is what seems like a continued unwarranted zeal in the quest for SERPs and PR, while not giving enough credit to strong and unique content.

CONTENT IMPORTANCE STRESSED BY GOOGLE

Let’s interject GOOGLE’s #3 “suggestion” on their Design and Content Guidelines
Page:

"Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content."

In fact GOOGLE makes multiple references to the importance of site content such as this one on the “Fact and Fiction” FAQ:

“However, given the nature of our inclusion process, your time is better spent improving the content and links of your site.”

KNOW YOUR PAGE VIEW STATISTICS

It's obviously more important for B2C ecommerce sites to find High SERPs, but if potential customers find information, product value, ease of use and a pleasurable experience, they would be more likely to hit that “SAVE AS A FAVORITE” button and become a repeat customer.

The point is that for many Sites, including my own that Search Engines generate a very small portion of the traffic!

Here is how my Page View traffic breaks down so far this month:

From Direct Address and Bookmarks – 72%
From Internal Links – 5.6%
From External Pages Other Than Search Engines – 10.8%
From Search Engines – 4%

There is not anything I know of that will trigger the need in a visitors mind to hit that “SAVE AS A FOVORITE” button than to find what they are looking for when they get there, presented in a manner that is a cut above the rest.

You will find that when triggering that response, traffic will grow exponentially over time.

Regards,
Ken

[sparshpolly]

Hi Ken
I wanted to throw some light into this .....

I had till a few days back - www.beta-theta.com which is now one of the fastest growing educational sites on the web . I used to analyse my traffic data and found that most of the uniques were from a traffic exchange system . It was like i put their banners and the more hits generate , better will my site be placed in their directory (Auto Rank Pro - Have you heard of it ) . the site teachers.teach-nology.com .... And even more than google some days even WPW gave me more hits. So it clearly proves that one has to concentrate on so many other aspects of traffic rather than just SEO and page rank. Isnt it..

[ADAM Web Design]

If trying to get inbound links for the purposes of search engines and developing content-rich websites were mutually exclusive, you'd be completely correct. However, they're not mutually exclusive.

Depending on the nature of the referring website and its stringency levels upon awarding outbound links, the site being linked to are generally moderated links and selected based on their usefulness to the subject matter of the referring website. In other words, the referring website development team (or webmaster, whatever the case may be) will generally only elect to provide a hyperlink from one website to another based on the quality of content of the website. So that's one way that they're connected.

There are obviously exceptions to this; unmoderated site media, such as forums, will often allow for the provision of a hyperlink based on the decision of a member, rather than the forum moderators (no offense mods, but by default everything gets in...dem's just the rules). But in this case, I'm not going to use these links, since they're not really relevant to the point.

So...how else are PR, SERPs, the zeal for inbound links, and content connected?

1. The quality of the outbound link. If a page has a PR6, it will generally have a great deal of backlinks. Since Google's PR is widely rumoured to be log base 10, and it's the easiest to figure out, I'm going to use it for our calculations.
   
   The PR6 page will have 100,000 backlinks to it, based on log base 10 (1, 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000). That's 100,000 different referring pages. Now, let's say that each referring page sends just one visitor to the PR6 page per month. That's 100,000 visitors per month.
   
   Now...let's say that just 1% of the traffic gets referred to an outbound link. That's 1000 visitors per month, or 12,000 in a year, off of just one hyperlink.
   
   Keep in mind that I didn't once mention the search engine impact as a result of the hyperlink; I merely mentioned the direct traffic potential.
   
2. The content of the website. It needs to be topically relevant and useful in order to get that inbound link, assuming the links are provided in a moderated fashion.
   
3. SERP results that turn up for the inbound link. How many times have you visited a site by clicking from a site that you found in a search engine? I've dont this quite a few times and gone 3, 4, 5, 6 levels deep myself.
   
4. Other engines. The funny thing about search engines is that the term is plural. There are engines out there besides Google and Yahoo! (Some of you may need to stop and take a puff from your inhalers before continuing. There you go. Feel better now? That's nice.) They do take inbound links into consideration when ranking websites, and probably moreso than Google does.
   

I can't speak for other people, but these and many others are the factors that go through my mind when I look for inbound links.