Why Blogs Have Become the Search Engine Optimization Equalizer
by Hunter Waterhouse
Published on this site: May 25th , 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
ALEXA WEIGHS IN...
For those who are unaware of Alexa, it offers an interesting
tool to webmasters. The service is designed to value websites
based on the number of people who visit those sites and the
activities of those people while they are on a site.
Keep in mind that their results are skewed to the activities of
those who use the Alexa toolbar. If your website is Business to
Business oriented, then the results may be useful to your needs.
If your site is Business to Customer oriented, then the Alexa results
are far from accurate in documenting the importance of your website.
The reason why the Alexa results are skewed to the Business
to Business market is because most people using the Alexa
toolbar are involved in Business-to-Business activities, either
as an user or provider of B2B services.
On May 24, 2005, Alexa's ranking of the Top Ten English Language
websites were as follows:
This info came from: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500
WHAT EIGHT OF THE TOP TEN WEBSITES ALL HAVE IN COMMON
Sure, five of these top ten sites are search oriented sites, but
that is not the answer.
Passport.net is owned by Microsoft and must be accessed when
someone is logging into the msn.com
network. Fastclick.com
is a site that helps advertisers buy advertising across a
huge network of sites. These two sites do not fit the profile.
The one thing that eight of our top ten sites have in common is
that they are content driven destinations and they add new, original,
and exclusive content on a daily basis.
BLOGS ARE THE GREAT EQUALIZER
Blogs are the great equalizer because they simplify the task of
adding content to a website on a daily or weekly basis. They make
it simple for the average joe to add content to their site on a
daily basis with just a few clicks of the mouse.
What is more, the spider search engine companies recognize this
and make it a point to spider the blog networks on a regular basis,
sometimes a daily basis.
It may take a spider search engine up to three months to spider
your site if you go directly to their submission page to add your
domain to their database. On the other hand, with a blog, you can
put a story about your domain on a blog with a link to your domain,
and your website can generally get crawled within a week or so of
putting your link on the blog.
BLOGS REQUIRE A COMMITMENT ON YOUR PART
Daily additions to your blog should be your goal. If you do not
have time to do daily additions, you should at worst do a weekly
addition to your blog.
Just like in the real world of websites, if you don't update your
blog on a regular basis, the spiders will save their time and resources
by not spidering your blog on a daily basis. If however you do update
on a daily or near daily basis, then the spiders will visit your
blog with the same fervor you bring to your blog.
Additionally, it sometimes seems like the search engine spiders
are giving some addition weight to the results culled from the blogs.
The point in this additional weighting is that blogs are filled
with personal comments and recommendations rather than sales pitches.
BLOGS ARE EASY TO SET UP, EVEN FOR THE RANK AMATEUR
There are in fact several blog programs available that you can
either load into your own domain or that you can use from a third
party, remotely hosted server.
To see a list of the blogging programs that are available, check
out this link:
http://keywordtext.com/redir/blog-list
My personal favorite is http://www.blogger.com
which happens to be owned by Google. Blogger allows you the
ability to use the software from their servers or to integrate
the blog software into your own site with very little effort
on your part.
I was able to integrate their software into our own site and to
customize the display of the blogger to fit our domain's format,
and I was able to pull that task off in just about 30 minutes with
most of that time dedicated to the custom display of our blog.
Add to the simplicity of setting up the blog, the fact that since
blogger.com is owned by
Google.com, they will always
be very keen to spider our blog on a regular basis.
From launch of our website, to the spidering of our site by Google
took just about ten days. Within three days of the launch of our
site, Google had spidered the main page of our site. Within ten
days, Google had already spidered the whole of our website.
Compared to other websites we have launched, this was the fastest
turn around time from new release to traffic from the search engines.
We believe the difference in this case study had to do more with
the addition of the blog on the day of our launch than anything
else we may have done to promote our domain.
EQUALIZE YOUR SITE WITH THE SITES OF THE BIG BOYS
The big sites on the internet got to be that way because they consistently
add new, original, and exclusive content to their websites.
While you and I may never have as much content on our sites as
the big boys do, we can benefit from the lessons they teach to us.
Now that you have also learned this important lesson, it is time
to put this knowledge into action. Make it part of your daily or
weekly schedule to add fresh, interesting content to your website.
Your banker will thank you.
Hunter Waterhouse is one of the editors at: KeywordText.com.
"Keyword Text" managed to bring together several writers
and editors to provide a few low-cost writing services for those
who are working hard to become more profitable. They offer Content
Creation Services which include: Exclusive WebPage Content and Reprint
Articles. Keyword Text also offers very attractive Volume discounts.
Compare us to our competition, you will be surprised.
http://keywordtext.com/dir.pl/ktc/index.html
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