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BLOGS

Blogs - that is an online diaries or journals - are increasingly popular, and can have a dramatic effect on search engine positioning.

Who cares about Blogs? Many bloggers certainly do, and some can be borderline fanatical that the medium is going to usher away traditional journalism. But search engines love Blogs! Google and Yahoo especially love web logs.

One of the most exciting aspects of blogging systems is that they have made it possible for many people to easily publish content to the Web without knowing HTML or web design.

"With Blogs and RSS feeds, content is updated in real time," said Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! "And people who want to get the updated information can get them. It is changing the way that people get their information from search engines; it is aggregating information. Since feeds are machine readable, there is no guessing game with constructing pages. The machine-readable nature makes this very precise and easy to work with. The technical challenge involved in getting into the RSS feed wasn't anywhere near the challenge that HTML was, and still is in many respects."

The inherent search engine friendly nature of blogs is what gets the attention of search engine marketers. Since blogs are so easy to publish, they tend to contain lots of fresh, keyword rich text. Since many blogs are rendered as static HTML pages in very standards compliant designs, all of this information is readily available to the search engine spiders.

There are two important aspects to this popular phenomenon. First, it allows your organization or business to create and publish content about YOU! Second, that by incorporating the content into your traditional web site, the search engines will see fresh, content and rank the web site higher.

Simple Syndication of blogs has shifted the choice of visible content over to site visitors. By using RSS feeds, blogs give visitors the ability to use blog aggregators such as Topix.net, Bloglines, Yahoo's blog aggregator or a desktop tool such as FeedDemon to view regular updates of their favorite blogs.

Why should you care about Blogs? According to Amanda Watlington "Because they have a different relationship between the user and the content." "It is an active relationship (blog) vs. a passive relationship," she continued. "Blogs provide faster access (to data) to an informed and interested audience."

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