As my recent post on findabity introduced, I am discovering tricks from the SEO (search engine optimization) guys in the online commerce world that educators can use to improve online learning in major ways. Take for example giving link juice. That potential professorial power is defined by a post at getfoundnow.com: “Link Juice refers to the quality or weight that any website can pass on to other sites through links.”
Interestingly, professors have been giving link juice for a long time in the form of listing their favorite links on a webpage they make themselves about the content in which they are expert. In his book Building Findable Websites, Aarron Walter puts the idea this way (p. 80):
Content that Sucks (Users In)
Well-produced, valuable content on a website has a gravity that can suck users in with great force. When people find something on the Web that’s exciting, they love to be the first to introduce others to it. Perhaps it’s ego or maybe it’s altruism. Combine this fact of human nature with the inherent connectivity of the Web and you have a recipe to unite a large number of people around your website.
