Copyright 2005 John JantschEveryone is talking about blogs these days as
magic money-making marketing tool. Some of
hype may actually be true, but I suggest you cut through most of what you read about blogs just long enough to understand why every business needs a blog.
Right now, that’s not to say this won’t change, search engines are in love with real blogs. By real blogs I mean blogs that are set-up and run by businesses that offer useful content on them. Like every successful marketing method there are people out there setting up fake blogs and dumping garbage, but keyword rich, content into them in order to trick
search engines into ranking
content highly. [Please resist
urge to add to this form of search engine spam as it may actually get you banned by a search engine.]
When you understand a little about how blog software works you get a better understanding about why search engines love blogs. Here are
top reasons that business blogs and search engines go hand in hand.
Lots of Pages Each blog entry is shown in chronological order on a blog’s homepage but, each entry is in reality its own web page, with its own unique URL and title. So, an active blogger can create hundreds of keyword rich web pages in a matter of months.
Change Is Good In order to claim your place at
blogging table you must commit to making posts often—4 or 5 times a week perhaps. This commitment means that you are creating, updating, changing some portion of your site several times a week. The typical small business web site is lucky to receive an update several times a year. Search engines like change.
Wake Up Call Because search engines love changing content, they are ever ready to visit a site when it is updated. One feature unique to blog software is something called a pinging. Basically, what you are doing is sending out a message to various blog directories to come and visit you site because it has been updated. Once a search engine has located your site, this is like a personal invitation to come back and get
new stuff. I use a site called Ping-O-Matic to send pings to multiple services. Some blog software can be configured to do this automatically.