Getting More Attention Online
There is a Forbes article that has published fourteen tips on how to get “more noticed” online and make sure your blog is successful. These tips make sense based on our understanding of the network concepts related to link analysis using hubs and authorities. For instance, one tip is “the more powerful the website that links to you, the stronger the influence on Google, and the better the rankings” according to HubSpot executive Shah (“14 Ways to Make Your Blog Get Real Attention”). Additionally, the same Forbes article also adds, “The single strongest variable in Google rankings is the number and authority of sites that link to a posting.” Furthermore, another notable tip mentioned is, “Say things that are useful enough that people will share them and link to them because that’s what drives traffic,” according to Shah.
From the course we know that the web has this ranking system that essentially counts links as “votes,” where more weight is put on more authoritative links. Specifically, links serve as “endorsements” and can be used to assess the authority of a page. This means that pages can essentially “vote” for the most useful pages by linking to them. And among the pages voting, some voted for several of the pages that earned a lot of “votes.” Therefore, it would seem that these pages seem to have a good sense of where the good pages are, and so, their votes are weighted more heavily. The authorities for a search are basically the highly-endorsed pages that have earned a lot of votes for being the most “relevant” results of the search.
In an attempt to give the most useful results, web searches use link analysis to find the most relevant “authoritative” pages. Therefore, Forbes is basically recommending bloggers to produce content such that powerful websites link to you, in order to improve your ranking. This makes sense because we know that quality/good hubs point to many quality authorities, and quality authorities are pointed to by quality hubs. For this reason, Forbes ultimately recommends bloggers to be as connected as possible and to not only link-to and be-linked-by as many pages as possible in the web, but also to pay attention to the quality of the links. This is because, as mentioned in the course, a page is important if it is linked to by other important pages, with pages that are seen as “more important” getting to make the more-heavily-weighted (or stronger) endorsements.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/08/06/14-ways-to-make-your-blog-get-real-attention/