I thought it would be cool to revisit something that few people pay attention to:
How well does an article written on steemit.com ranks on the search engines?
Let's jump into it and look at the data shall we?
The Authority of Steemit.com
Here are 2 basic set of data to tell us how "authoritative" steemit.com is on the search engine:
The job of Alexa is to rank websites by the amount of visitors it gets. The search engines take that into account. I wouldn't be surprised next year to attain the top 500 when the roll out of community happen.
I've been keeping an eye on the MOZ metric for more than a year and Steemit.com domain authority keeps moving up.
What does it mean for you? What does it mean for steemit.com?
It means that when you publish an article, your article as a higher chance to get visibility on the search engine than if you wrote on your own website. For anyone who's a niche blogger, just blogging here gives you an edge over the competition...EVEN if you don't make money on your articles with upvote rewards.
So now that we know that our articles are so much easier to rank, how do we get Dofollow links to external websites?
Do-Follow Links
Do-Follow Links are really valuable, especially from a website like ours. So are all the links on steemit.com Do-Follow? Nope! Too bad for those link spammers who would like to suck all the SEO juice out of steemit.com
Steemit Inc was smart and they made a rule that for the article to have do-follow links enabled it has to have a certain amount of vote weight behind it. Something around $10 of value last time I checked. (don't quote me on the exact number)
So if some smarty-pants wanted to get Do-Follow links he would either have to buy 50,000 STEEMPOWER to upvote his own post OR actually write that the community want to read about and upvote for.
Conclusion
Steemit.com seems to have a lot of long-form content. Not only that, we have a crazy level of engagement with a lot of comments (which adds to the length of the post).
This is the amount of new post created every day on steemit.com
All of those articles have a chance of ranking on the search engine for different keywords. The more of them ranks, the higher the numbers of visitors to the website we get. (# of visitors to the website is definitely picking up in the last month). This all creates a virtuous cycle of added reach.
No other cryptocurrency has something like it powering it's influence across niches and interests. This is why, in my opinion, I have no doubt that in the 3-5 years ahead of us, with more websites being built on top of steem with similar success, that we could have in aggregate the biggest social media hub in the world...$100 per STEEM is not a pipe-dream at this point.