Knol Profile SEO and Optimization

Like much of the speculation about Knol flying around the SEO community in the last few days, the question on everyone mind is, “How sticky are Knol articles within the organic Google listings.”

Before I jump into my main article about your Knol profile, I do want to point one thing out: I noticed that Danny Sulivan created an article about “Firefox plugins for SEO and SEM“. If you follow this link to the Google SERPs, you’ll notice just how good his article is doing.

Onto the main event:

You can go to Sphinn and do a search for Knol to get all sorts of opinion and information. What I want to focus on is the act of creating your Knol profile and how it ranks.

For this article I have created and updated my knol profile with a limited amount of information, but several keywords based around what I do.

Click the image to see it in greater detail, but note:

• The URL of the page. This comes from searching my name and clicking on a result. For you lazy people, this is the URL: http://knol.google.com/k/michael-tighe/michael-tighe/
• The information I filled out has not (yet) gone into great detail, but I’ve submitted my photo, written a summary with specific keywords, and given myself a title.

As I have just done this, my profile probably won’t get picked up by the bots for a few days, but lets try a quick internal search. Lets try, for example, the term ‘SEO’.

You will notice that my profile now appears – granted not many people have updated their profile. This seems like a pretty good reason to do it though. *NOTE: I just noticed when I logout that you don’t get the same search results. This is either due to my not being verified (I can’t as I live in Canada), or it takes a few days to become public.

Lets try something harder

Lets see how someones profile might rank. For the purposes of this experiment, lets use todays feature author “Richard Kraig“. Doing a simple Google search for ‘Richard Kraig’ here is our results:

Third on the list, not to shabby for a published neurologist and neuroscientist.

Conclusion: Knol profiles can pack a punch on the SERPS and can help promote you within Knol.