Link Building with PageRank Reflection
Here is one powerful way you could incorporate Squidoo into your search engine optimization campaign. This involves a concept that I call PageRank reflection, obviously referring to the way Google applies a value to web sites based on the quality and number of links that point back to it. But the concept is sound for any of the major search engines because they all take links into account when ranking sites.
I would define PageRank reflection as the process of linking to a high PageRank web site that also links back to you in order to aid search engine spiders in finding the site. It sounds a little bit like link swapping, but the difference is that we are mainly concerned with sites where we control the process of placing a link back to our web site.
Examples of the types of sites I am talking about include social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg.com., as well as sites like Squidoo that allow you to post links in the HTML content. Social bookmarking has incredible power if you aggressively tag and bookmark high quality content. Squidoo lets you create keyword rich pages with links to anything you want, and unlike Wikipedia, you have complete control of the content on your “lenses” (as they are called in Squidoo world).
For the rest of our example, we will stick with Squidoo, although the concept is applicable to many different types of web sites. Google loves Squidoo pages, and the main Squidoo page has a very high PageRank. The tags pages in Squidoo also tend to have high PageRank.
Remember how PageRank works: it is spread around from site to site via links (unless the links are “nofollow” links, in which case they are no good for SEO). The tags pages (the pages which list keywords people have used to categorize their Squidoo lenses) generally have high PageRank values as well. The tags pages that feature tags used in your Squidoo lenses will link to a list of pages that use those tags, so one of those pages will link to your Squidoo lens. Your Squidoo lens will in turn link to your web site (at least it should). Your Squidoo lenses will also have a list of tags which link to the tags pages.
The “reflection” part of this method refers to how you help Google and other search engines find your Squidoo pages to start with: you link to them! Now, if your main site is not indexed and Google never comes to your page looking for updates, then this strategy does not work. FIRST, Google needs to know about your site. The last thing you want to do is submit your site directly to Google because it takes a very long time to get indexed. Instead, find a blog or other popular site and get a link back to your site. You can do this via a blog comment if you find a relevant blog that allows “dofollow” links.
Once your site is indexed and you know Google returns to it periodically looking for content, then you can begin the PageRank reflection process. All you have to do is link to your Squidoo page(s). Google will follow the link from your web site to your Squidoo page, follow the tag links from your Squidoo page to a Squidoo tags page, then follow the tags, which will eventually lead it back to your Squidoo page, where it will find the link back to your site.
Thus, you have “reflected” PageRank back to your site by helping Google find your Squidoo page. Again, this concept is applicable to any kind of web page where you have the ability to create links, such as blogs and social bookmarking sites.
