BI Revolution

Stumbling On A New Metric

Working up a proposal to add an ecommerce store to a local powerhouse in content marketing I stumbled on a cool new metric - Link Efficiency Index or LEI (not the flowers that go around your neck).

Why LEI Is Important
Google doesn’t look at your website isolated from others. Google models an ecosystem where those who THINK LIKE GOOGLE are rewarding. Links are Google's magic, the votes they use to form their index.

Links are special and valuable. Google recently hit the reset button because many websites, realizing how valuable their links were, began to sell links. Selling links destroys Google's model because links aren't "votes" when purchased. Links don't represent Traffic TRUTH when sold.

Post Panda and Penguin Google wants REAL VOTES. Actually they want much more. They want YOU, if you are a lucky few Internet marketer, to create content people love, share and link to because doing so reduces their costs.

Even more than the money is creating great content reinforces Google's value proposition - getting people to relevant content fast. Internet marketers must be concerned with how efficiently they create inbound links.

LEI is calculated: LINKS IN / Total Google Pages

I use Alexa to get Links In and site:URL.com to know the total pages indexed by Google. Creating an LEI tells you how many pages it takes to generate a single inbound link. Here were the values I found the other day:

A) .00534 vs. B) .0027

This means A creates a link every ..00534 of a page loaded into the web (and that makes it into Google's index). The real value of the metric is in comparing to past performance and competition. (A) Is creating links roughly 2x as efficiently as their competitor.

Both (A) and (B) have PageRan7's. But I would rather be (A). A's PR7 is more likely to become an 8 because they have FEWER pages in Google index (by several million), but their social support of those pages and their link creation efficiency is so much better than their competitors their PR7 is more like a 7.8 where there competitors are more of a 7.1.

Understand link creation efficiency by creating simple LEI provides valuable SEO and competitive insight.