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Tracking Back - Seven Ways to Show the Love!

In his new, Hubspot-pimping blog Small Business 2.0, Dharmesh Shah discusses The Importance of Google PageRank:

Organic search is like free advertising.  It’s worth the investment to try and get a high ranking by the major search engines.  To rank high you should do two things:  First, make sure your site has the right relevant content for the types of searches your potential clients are conducting.  Second, try to get the highest PageRank possible.  To do this, you need to get as many inbound links from as many high PageRank web pages as possible.

I would say organic search position is  more like “free media”, in that it is not free, but there seem some good ways to get links to improve position. You want people to write about you, and if you start with the blog metaphor, that means a trackback. Some ideas for improving trackbacks toy our site:

  1. Make your site/posts easy to link to. Simple URL is helpful that way
  2. Find who is linking to you - technorati, trackback pings, etc.
  3. Link to those linking to you - either as a special kind of comment (Wordpress, Typepad both do this) or
  4. Make a post of trackbacks to say “thank you” to your linkers, and continue the conversation through the post. This will tell people that you are reading their trackbacks and encourage them to do more.
  5. Email those who link to you to say “thanks”
  6. Comment on the trackbacking posts
  7. Ask your readers to comment via trackback.

I tend to think that you will get better bang for the buck - improved pagerank, more readers, and a conversation that spans more territory - when you get a trackback than when a user just posts a comment directly on your page - or discusses in a digg/reddit/etc forum.

So get the love by showing the love. And if you are making software in this space (hint hint) I’d encourage making this an insanely easy thing to do.

 

 

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This

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