Blogs and Search Engines – The Secret Love Story!

While there’s always been lots of debate as to what criteria Search
Engines use to rank web pages in their search results, what there is
little debate about is that appearing high up on the Search Engines
Results page has become of key importance to most businesses. Why?
Simply because currently, Search Engines are the preferred research
tools in today’s marketplace.

As a result, Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO)
has developed into a thriving (if often maligned) industry as organizations, both large and small, strive to gain higher positions and
greater visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs).





The other thing that has become increasingly apparent is that blogs
(and business blogs in particular) have a number of attributes which
help them rank highly in the Search Engines, making them an important or
even, dare I say, a key part of Search Engine Marketing. To understand
why, first let’s have a quick reminder of how Search Engines work.

Search Engines: a few basics

The main Search Engines – I’m thinking here primarily of Google, Yahoo
and Live – collect information from websites using electronic programs
called “robots” or “spiders”. They find new sites and content generally
by following links and then reading and indexing the code which creates
the individual pages (and hence the text they contain). This is all
stored on their servers so that when a search is submitted, the Search
Engine sifts through all the relevant pages in its index and then ranks
them in terms of relevancy using a mathematical algorithm. The result of
all this is what we see on the Search Engine results page.



They determine this relevancy using over 100 different criteria, if
we are to believe the experts in this field, though some criteria are
obviously considered more “valuable” than others. Those considered
particularly important include the text itself, the inbound and internal
links, focus and relevancy of the information and some key onpage
elements such as the Title tag. It is also worth reminding ourselves
that search engines rank individual pages rather than whole websites
when they create their results pages.

So how can we apply this to blogs?

Armed with an overview of what Search Engines are looking for to rank
pages highly, it’s clear that blogs do in fact fulfil a number of these
criteria perfectly, which goes a long way to explain why they rank so
well. Specifically:

• Text: Business Blogs tend to be focused
  in their content and that is ideal for what Search Engines look for
  when they are searching for pages which fit with specific search
  criteria;




• External Inbound Links: the overriding philosophy
  in the blogosphere is to reference other blogs by linking to relevant
  sources; so blogs offering good (and often specific) content are likely
  to attract a greater number of links;




• Internal Links: blogs are automatically structured
  in such a way that the internal linking is excellent with highly
  relevant anchor text (the words that actually form the link) which is an
  extra bonus;




• Up to date information: the most successful blogs
  are generally ones which are regularly updated and hence offer a growing
  resource of recent and relevant content;




• Onpage elements: good blogging software has
  excellent flexibility which gives you the opportunity to have specific
  onpage elements (such as the Title Tag) for each individual page.

Blog Search Engines, Pinging and Instant Indexing

Although blogs appear in the main Search Engines like any other online
site, they also have their own set of Search Engines which focus
primarily on blogs. This is important because the way that these Blog
Search Engines find new content is different to the main Search Engines.



If blogs are set up correctly, they will automatically “ping” these
search engines – this is the digital equivalent to a ‘tap on the
shoulder’ telling them that there is new content for them to index. This
happens instantly and, with one of these Blog Search Engines belonging
to Google, this means that Google’s main index can pick up your post almost immediately – my best is 6 minutes.





Of course, if the blog is part of your main website then there is
also the greater chance of the rest of your site being indexed more
frequently too, let alone all the pages benefiting from the value of the
inbound links coming into the blog, linking to your new articles! Ah,
is there no end to the benefits!!

Conclusion: keep developing your Business Blog

If, like me, you already use a blog for your business, then these Search
Engine benefits will not be anything new – no doubt you will have
already have seen the sort of great results that you can achieve. If you
haven’t, then we really need to talk!
However, they are particularly impressive when you consider that you
are probably writing your blog with your readers uppermost in your mind
and these benefits are merely a welcome (albeit very beneficial) side
effect.



Business blogs however are not a magic solution and nor should they
be used in isolation – they are at their best when used in conjunction
with other marketing activities, both online and offline. Equally, they
are not trying to manipulate Search Engines – an accusation sometimes
levelled at SEO companies. Simply put, well
written and focused blogs give Search Engines exactly what they want to
provide for their users – good, specific and up to date information on
the subject matter that they are searching for.



And providing that is of course where both the challenge and the benefits lie!Tweet