Linking out for a profitable gardening future

For all of you garden bloggers seeking to better your lot, I bet you are constantly battling to get in bound links to your site in order to gain a better page rank - right?

Better page rank means better authority and traffic leading to greater profits for you and your business in the future.

But, and this is something I have considered for a while now, Page Rank is much less important to you as a site owner than linking out to great information and resources over the net.

Aaron Wall articulates some thoughts about outbound links being of more importance than page rank and quotes Mike Grehan who is a 'noted world authority on search marketing' as saying:

"Simply for this reason (and these are purely my own thoughts and opinions): I believe that PageRank has always been flawed.

"I believe that Kleinberg's HITS algorithm (and the variations on it), being closer to subject specific, provides more relevant results. A few years ago when Teoma was launched, there were lots of comparisons made about Jon Kleinberg's HITS algorithm.

"What many people didn't realise was, Kleinberg's algorithm had suffered its own problems: Namely "topic drift" and "run time analysis" delays.

"Monica Henzinger, now head of research at Google, played a major role in developing solutions to the "topic drift" problem (curiously enough by introducing a little element of PageRank in the recipe). But the "run time analysis" problem remained.

"In simple terms, the results from the HITS algorithm were more relevant, but they took an eternity (in web search expectation time) to compute."

I know, you are a gardener or a landscaper and maybe thinking that there is little relevance or use for you running a company that works outside, up to your neck in mud and rose prunings, to put anything like this in to practise.

A little time, maybe on a wet day, spent building up your blog or website by linking to information that reflects your area of activity will strengthen your brand.

Building a matrix of local keyword references and outbound links to local resources, suppliers and information will help put your business at the forefront of your local area.

Linking out is one of the main reasons why Michelle at Veg Plotting has managed a page rank of four in such a very short space of time.