Category: web 2.0

As I promised Dennis, today we are going to address a common small business complaint, online visibility.

Usually when we talk about online visibility we are talking about search engine optimization, or the process of making your website organically appear in the top results on a search engine.

Today’s focus will actually center on blogging. So, how can blogging help you show up higher in the serps, or Search engine results pages?

Well, large search engines, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo index your content to determine what your site is about. They load the data on your site into their indexes, and then when a searcher enters a particular topic, they look for that word, or words that are commonly found along with that word, within all the sites of their index.

Now, you may have a site that is the most relevant to the searcher, but search engines are also looking for longevity. The number of years you have your site registered for, the number of pages on your site that they have indexed, and the number of quality links pointing to your site, from other ‘quality’ sites all play a factor in the ‘rank’ of your site.

That rank, along with the relevance of your site to the term that was searched will determine your place in the SERPs.

To learn your site’s page rank in Google, you can download the google toolbar or, if you are using Firefox to surf the web, you can also download a plugin from getfirefox.com that will allow you to view your google page rank.

Or, to get a view of how your site looks in the top 3 search engines, go to ehlist.ca. Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for your search so you can get continual updates on your site’s performance while at the ehlist site.

Now that you understand SEO a bit, let’s look at how blogging improves your results.

1. Blogging gives indexed pages.

A blogger who writes daily will amass 30 or so articles per month. In one year they will have 365 posts or pages, as far as the search engines are concerned. The more pages you have indexed the higher your ranking.

2. Blogging gives you continuous updates.

Everytime you blog, if your blog platform is set-up to auto-ping the search engines, you are sending out an invitation to be ‘crawled’ by the search engines spiders. In other words, the spiders or robots that take your content back to the search engines are going to come to your site to get that content EVERYTIME you post a blog entry.

3. Most importantly, blogging gives you content that is relevant to your keywords and key phrases.

The content that you write will be relevant to your site. If you use the key words and key phrases that describe your site often, you are giving the search engines great clues as to how to classify your site.

Of course, you shouldn’t sacrifice your reader’s enjoyment to ‘look good’ to a search engine bot. Just write naturally yet with a purpose of SEO in mind, and you will end up with posts that are keyword-rich, without sacrificing readability.

Coming up: Article Submission for SEO – Including my charges for article submission and common results achieved.