Thinking Tech

Brian at the Pajama Market Blog commented on a previous post about blogging. He mentioned my list of reasons that clients might want to think about creating blogs, and commented as follows:

Boost search engine ranking. [Although Bob is right about blogs scoring high on search engine results, he's wrong on the reasoning. In his post he says Google and Yahoo! are given better standing when they are frequently updated. This used to be an SEO axiom, but doesn't hold water any longer. For example, I have a website that hasn't been updated in two years that still ranks #1 for my optimum keyword search 'Americas Army Strategy' (I created the StrAAtegy newsletter). What really drives the search engine rankings is the number of relevant websites that link to your site. The more posts you write, the more likely someone will link to a post, and the more links you get, the better your search engine results.]

Brian is correct that it is not just the activity on a blog that produces rankings on Yahoo and Google. Most SEO (search engine optimization) today concentrates in the areas of (a) keywords, (b) domain names (e.g. if you have a blog on Pajamas, having Pajamas in your domain name seems to elevate the ranking), (c) incoming links to your site (how many other sites link to you), etc. The list is ever changing.

Most important, however, is the choice of keywords. If you try to optimize your site for the word "computer," it's pure luck (or a whale of a lot of work) to get to the top of the listing. Interestingly enough, when I ran the search today, the IEEE Computer Society came up first, followed by Dell, Apple, and an entry from Wikipedia. While it might be possible to get into this list through organic SEO (as opposed to paid search), my guess is that it would take more work than most businesses want to put into SEO. Of course, if you decide to do this, you could just get lucky.

Brian's Americas Army Strategy does come up at the top of the list, and from looking at the page, I can see why. He has multiple references to the search term (Americas Army Strategy), the search term matches precisely several terms on the page, he has links with the term in them, etc.

As another example, Data Guidance Group has produced a link to the dgginc.com site as #1 in Google for several years...even before I put the blog feed on the home page. After all, who else would want to bring people who searched for "Data Guidance Group" to their web page?

So, while I'll agree that there are additional factors in the effect of Blogs on Search Engine Positioning, I still think frequency of update is one factor.

Thanks again for the trackback Brian.

Ciao

Small Business Blog of the Day: Bob Palmer on why your business should have a blog