Blogs Equal SEO Power In Searches

Chris · #1 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 09:43 AM

The following was written by Wayne Hurlbert

They are truly search engine optimization powerhouses. Before your eyes glaze over, and you start to yawn, keep in mind that many of your brand new blog visitor traffic arrives from search engines.

These include Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, and A9.com.

Ranking well, and preferably on the first page, is key to gaining extra free visitor traffic. Being placed on the second page for a search isn't too bad either.

By way of an SEO blog example, here are some search results for Blog Business World for uber competitive keywords.

We'll examine the search for the two word phrase "business world" without the quotes.

On Google, this blog ranks #8 out of an incredibly mind boggling 158,000,000 returns. You read that correctly. 158 million search results.

Okay, I'm not number on on page one. Of course, ranking just behind the BBC and the World Bank isn't too shabby.

Blog Business World is slightly less well ranked on Yahoo at #19, and is located on page two.

Of course, Yahoo search returns total an even more incredible 270,000,000 linked sites.

Yes, that is 270 million returns for the search term "business world".

In terms of SEO, those are very powerful returns indeed.

Note the power of a little old blog, in competition with those extremely wealthy and huge organizations.

If you ever doubted the search engine optimization power of a blog before, that might just change your mind.

A blog oozes SEO power.

Get a blog working in the search engines for your business today.
There is no cheaper or more effective SEO available.

Anywhere, at any price.

wlodi · #2 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 01:52 PM

hey,

business world ?

checked overture for number of searches first?

no one optimized their site for that key phrase.

Sorry, but that is not a story for the WPW newsletter.

cheers,

wlodi

MSS · #3 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 01:56 PM

Hi All-

Back when I could only find a handful of articles about business blogs, we bought a few names with the hopes of starting our own business blog sites to add to our construction network. A year and a half later, we installed blog software and now post articles. To our surprise (a.k.a. hysterical excitement), the articles come ranked pretty high in the search engines.

For a site that was launched just in January 2005, last month we did 1355 unique, 3280 visitors and 11,225 page views. This is just with your basic free 12 engine submission and dmoz, no ppc, or otherwise, hadn't even had a chance to properly launch with all the hoopla.

Many of the article titles come in at Yahoo #3, 4 and what amazes me is that they are indexed so fast. I posted an article and three days later saw it in Yahoo at #7.

What I find unusual is that 'everyone' talks about what Google is doing with blogs and robots for blogs, etc. but we don't come in too high in Google for our blog articles like we do in Yahoo and MSN.

I didn't mention above that the actual domains come up pretty high as well, but I think that's because we're in an industry that is a bit lagging in the technology field, so we tend to stay ahead of the competition when it comes to SEO, Advertising and Pay Per Click, etc. for our industry. That's another post in itself.

To summarize, anyone who has a website or wants a web presence and can provide informative content relating to their business SHOULD have a blog and post regularly.

Peter (IMC) · #4 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 03:53 PM

Ranking number 1 for a name isn't that special if you ask me. A 2 word phrase with the 2 words "business" and "world" in them will give such huge number of results but that means nothing. Try searching with quotes and you find less than 5 million results in google. An intitle:"business world" inanchor:"business world" search results in something like 4 thousand results. That's nothing special.

The number of search results is an often used way to impress people, but really it doesn't say that much.

Blogs are as powerful as a normal website. It´s just that blogs generally are about recent events and therefore target popular phrases, very easy to maintain, very quick to add new content, etc. That´s why they are powerful, but rankingwise they´re not more special than normal sites.

The ping services are nice though,. that helps you get visitors, indexed, and links.

lunacy8m · #5 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 04:00 PM

GadgetMadness.com ranks quite well in Google:

Robosapien Review (#1)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

iLo MP3 Review (#1)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ew&btnG=Search

Sony PSP USB GPS (Top five)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ps&btnG=Search

to name just a few.

Smoky · #6 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 04:51 PM

I'm so glad you made that post.

I've been optimizing my website for going on 12 months, reading all the do's and don't and what not's... I came to the conclusion, that Google is really not that clever and probably outsmarts itself at different time.

Results for keywords often show rubbish and the rubbish stays there month after month... so, may strategy has been to just keep working for the good of our visitors and to publish articles and provide good useful content on our page.

I do not engage in any 'funny business' I just write the text and of course get backlinks - over the past 3-4 months, we've steadily been climing in Google, and rank on the first page or two of most other search engines (I've never optimized anything for any of them)... so what are all these algorythems really doing?

Cheers,
Smoky

Linda Buquet · #7 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 05:14 PM

CRich said:

"Get a blog working in the search engines for your business today. There is no cheaper or more effective SEO available. Anywhere, at any price."

I second that! Search Engines L O V E blogs, and that's why I have a new obsession with blogging.

First I designed an MSN Spaces affiliate blog, since it's easy, just to get the hang of it. It rates #3 -5 in Google depending on the day. Plus it brings some decent link pop to my other sites that I list in the blog.

Next I built a page about affiliate blogs and it ranked #1 in Google out of 1.4 million for "affiliate blogs." But that page wasn't even a true blog, had messy HTML, wasn't WC3 and didn't verify.
(Note hate to admit it, but could not figure out how to get a REAL blog going so was cutting and pasting raw HTML daily from another blog, just to get some content going. But HEY I was #1.)

I just paid a top Word Press designer to develop a super clean REAL blog for me, actually a network of affiliate blogs including mine and several other top blogs. Put them all on a subdomain which should also help rankings. So excited to see how many #1's I can get with this one and how much traffic it can pull after everything gets indexed.

Just finished tweaking it out today and added to my site, my sig here and some other forums to help G find it. Fingers crossed!

fxchain · #8 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 06:40 PM

Quote:

"Get a blog working in the search engines for your business today. There is no cheaper or more effective SEO available. Anywhere, at any price."

I third that!

I created a blog about my industry a month ago, for free, and I am already showing 1st and 2nd page rankings on MSN and Yahoo for my keywords, right next to the "big guys". Search engines love blogs, will crawl fast and rank them well. I am working on a 2nd one and hopefully will soon create a network of blogs.

I am currently experimenting a special XML-RPC request for Yahoo's API that notify yahoo of a new post. If yahoo receives this request, it will come crawl your new post very fast. How cool is that!

I think blogs are the way to SEO right now.

Francois

Wayne Hurlbert · #9 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 07:08 PM

While it could be argued that the search phrase business world is not all that important, the total number of results is still very high.

Note that of those 160 million returns, a blog was still on page one when the dust settled. Whether the term was ultra competitive or not, the point of the article was that the front page ranking was achieved with a blog.

Blogs rank well in the search engines.

That is almost indisputable, especially for those website owners who have limited internet or SEO skills. The blog provides great results regardless.

Blogs have frequently updated content.

Blog posts are rich in theme relevant content, and usually targeted to only a few topics and themes.

Blogs have many incoming links from other theme relevant blogs and websites.

Whether or not Google PageRank provides much power anymore, blogs tend to have strong PageRanks anyway. They can't hurt.

That is only the tip of the SEO iceberg for blogs too. The blog itself can be SEO'ed too, as with any other website.

I recommend blogs for SEO purposes, as they rank very well indeed.

I also recommend blogs for marketing purposes as well, but that's a story for another day. :-)

Wayne Hurlbert

Peter (IMC) · #10 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 09:06 PM

Quote:

Whether or not Google PageRank provides much power anymore, blogs tend to have strong PageRanks anyway.

You say that blogs tend to have strong PageRank anyway, and you wonder if pagerank still provides much power????

:D

Wayne Hurlbert · #11 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 10:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

Quote:

Whether or not Google PageRank provides much power anymore, blogs tend to have strong PageRanks anyway.

You say that blogs tend to have strong PageRank anyway, and you wonder if pagerank still provides much power????

:D

Blogs have strong Google PageRanks as a result of their incoming links. There is some evidence that PageRank is less important in the Google algorithm than it used to be in the past. The two statements are not mutually exclusive. :-)

What benefit that Google PageRank does still provide, blogs do get the full benefit of it, even if it's less than was received in the past. :-)

divicohen · #12 (**permalink**) 03-18-2005, 11:31 PM

I would like to know if all blogs are equal?

I saw maybe 10-15 different blog sites,
blogger, manila, blogdrive, blogontheweb,webbloger and list goes on and on,

which one will be better , if I would like to start a blog ?

thanks

cryptblade · #13 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 12:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wlodi

hey,

business world ?

checked overture for number of searches first?

no one optimized their site for that key phrase.

Sorry, but that is not a story for the WPW newsletter.

cheers,

wlodi

That's all good to criticize someone's article, but back it up. I dont see anything about your experience with blogs NOT ranking well - since most of the posters here say they do. I'd like to see some evidence that they don't rank well at all. Anyone?

I really haven't tried it much at all - but I'd like to see if anyone got bad results?

By the way, your methodology is faulty. A check on Overture for "business world" means nothing. I've seen keywords appear one month and disappear the next.

ppayne · #14 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 02:05 AM

In addition to being fun, Blogging is a good way to bring in traffic to your business and also legitimize your business a bit -- done right, Blogging can make you an expert (although be warned, there are many ways to do them wrong). I created my blog, J-List Side Blog, with Blogger (the best tool out there) and moved over my 7 years of old posts to the Blogger system. After a small problem with duplicated text (since my old site's info was still up), the blog comments seem to do really well, and get indexed within 3-4 days.

Did I mention it's fun?

Jason Tor · #15 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 03:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

Blogs are as powerful as a normal website. It’s just that blogs generally are about recent events and therefore target popular phrases, very easy to maintain, very quick to add new content, etc. That’s why they are powerful, but rankingwise they´re not more special than normal sites.

Actually they are quite a bit more powerful then a regular site. The search engines love them and will crawl a site much more frequently and you will get better results.

The down side is many "link blog spammers" (sites that link to your blog to increase their rank) add your blog link to their site, I viewed my blog one night and noticed several porn site linking to me.

I blocked them of course however, it was extra work for me, but it all pays off in the end. I recommend adding a blog to your site right away, have fun with it and watch your rankings and traffic improve.

Jason Tor

keywordguy · #16 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 03:36 AM

Currently, I don't develop a site for a customer without a blog now. I've been watching logs and blogs are getting hit...too early to speak of results. The hardest thing for customers to get used to is the idea of writing about what they do even on a casual basis to create unique content regarding their business or niche.

I agree with other posts as Blogs being a powerful and creative way to develop site and business credibility. One of my customers is now conducting un-biased product tests and reporting on the results in their blog. I know it will only be a short time before they start showing up well for their blog content.

Blogs Rock!

TrafficProducer · #17 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 06:26 AM

BLOGS = FFA?

With so many BLOGs are they becomming like FFA, Free For All sites?

Maybe not yet but the may soon become like this as more junk gets posted in the hope of Traffic back to the site posting the BLOG.

Blogs. Blogging. BLOG. Here's a few links
http://www.acomputerportal.com/blogs.html

RSS, Really Simple Syndication. (Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary) Page.
http://www.acomputerportal.com/rss.html

XML, eXtensible Markup Language eXtensible Markup Language Page
http://www.acomputerportal.com/xml_e..._language.html

XBRL. eXtensible Business Reporting Language
Press Release List & Article Publishing
http://www.acomputerportal.com/xbrl.html

Podcasting, Podcast
http://www.acomputerportal.com/podcasting.html

Press Release List & Article Publishing
http://www.acomputerportal.com/press_release.html

Wayne Hurlbert · #18 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 09:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by divicohen

I would like to know if all blogs are equal?

I saw maybe 10-15 different blog sites,
blogger, manila, blogdrive, blogontheweb,webbloger and list goes on and on,

which one will be better , if I would like to start a blog ?

thanks

Some very good blog hosting companies include:

TypePad and Movable Type are very good. Both are offered by Six Apart and they have strong customer support.

WordPress is very good too.

t-blog and Blog City are also good hosts, and there are several other good hosts as well.

Google owned Blogger is what I use, and have used it for several years, but I don't recommend it for business blog purposes. There are too many limitations, as Blogger has not kept up with the most recent advances in blogging technology including trackback and categories.

When looking for a blog hosting company, check out some blogs that use that host first. Get the feel of the look of the blogs that appear on the available templates. Most blog hosts offer pre-coded templates, but in virtually all cases, they are highly customizable as to coding.

For SEO purposes, they usually need re-coding, especialy in the pre-written CSS. Most blog templates were written for design and not SEO.

A good blog must have available the following basic essentials:

comments, trackback, categories and tags, RSS feed

Comments are necessary for your visitors to interact with you. For a business blog, that is powerful customer feedback. It builds a relationship of trust with potential new customers and clients. I believe that blogs are a conversation between the blogger and the reader. Comments provide that opportunity for dialogue.

Trackback is used to tell another blog that you quoted and linked to one of their posts (articles). As a traffic builder, it is extremely powerful, as it builds a long tail of interconnected linking, all through the blogging community.

Categories and tags are also important. Categories classify the posts by subject matter like a library. Posts on business, customer service, marketing, etc. are all grouped together for ease of navigation and on site search. Tags are used by the blog search engine Technorati to classify blog searches. Tag searches bring visitors and potential customers every day to the blogs that use them.

RSS is Really Simple Syndication. It is a feed from your blog that is sent out through the various newsreaders and aggregators. Your blog post can sit right beside a news article from CNN. People can also subscribe to your specific RSS feed and read your latest post as it appears in real time.

All of those features are essential for a good business blog.

Happy blogging!

Wayne Hurlbert

Peter (IMC) · #19 (**permalink**) 03-19-2005, 12:26 PM

Quote:

Actually they are quite a bit more powerful then a regular site. The search engines love them and will crawl a site much more frequently and you will get better results.

Search engines don't tread sites different because they are a blog. They like blogs because of a number of factors that happen to (almost) automatically go right in a blog.

You can actually learn some SEO lessons from a blog.

who67 · #20 (**permalink**) 03-20-2005, 04:06 PM

I have a new blog called http://www.work-from-home-business-opportunities.info

So far after 3 months I have not seen any advantage over my other sites.

Jason Tor · #21 (**permalink**) 03-20-2005, 04:55 PM

There may not be an advantage with just a blog site, I think what were talking about is adding a blog to a website.

Jason Tor

Peter (IMC) · #22 (**permalink**) 03-20-2005, 06:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by who67

I have a new blog called http://www.work-from-home-business-opportunities.info

So far after 3 months I have not seen any advantage over my other sites.

Are you using the ping services? Also,. are you doing any link building? You need to do all the same work,. :)

who67 · #23 (**permalink**) 03-20-2005, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

Quote:

Originally Posted by who67

I have a new blog called http://www.work-from-home-business-opportunities.info

So far after 3 months I have not seen any advantage over my other sites.

Are you using the ping services? Also,. are you doing any link building? You need to do all the same work,. :)

Yes I am using the ping service bit I have not yet done an extensive link exchange campaign as of yet.

I did just today submit to all the directories I know about and I am adding my link in my signiture on as many Discusuion boards that I know of.

incrediblehelp · #24 (**permalink**) 03-22-2005, 09:09 PM

What are some popular free or paid blog softwares that some of you are using? I just used blogger.com in the past, but I would like some easy to use software for myself and clients.

flood6 · #25 (**permalink**) 03-23-2005, 01:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

What are some popular free or paid blog softwares that some of you are using?

The only blog I've ever created was with BBlog. I modified the heck out of it make it fit "into" my site, but I like it. I'm not going to sing its praises, but it does what its supposed to. Having no other experience, you'll have to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I remember seeing a site that did a head-to-head comparison of most of the "top" php-opensource blogging packages. I can't seem to find it right now, but I'm sure some deeper searching would turn it up.

se-survivor · #26 (**permalink**) 03-23-2005, 12:33 PM

Blog comparisons:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22bl...%2C+comparison

http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

We need a consumer reports on this stuff...argghh.

<flood6 edit-fixed long url>

incrediblehelp · #27 (**permalink**) 03-23-2005, 03:01 PM

thanks survivor, do you have a fav?

se-survivor · #28 (**permalink**) 03-23-2005, 05:19 PM

Sorry hulk:

Just getting into blogs...but it should be fun.

Looks like the top guys are already monopolizing the traffic, though, by linking back and forth between themselves. It's kind of like the Giants on the outside passing the traffic back and forth between each other. And now with the no follow tag this stuff will be limited too..

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050118-4536.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01...mer_interview/

Peter (IMC) · #29 (**permalink**) 03-23-2005, 09:23 PM

Quote:

What are some popular free or paid blog softwares that some of you are using? I just used blogger.com in the past, but I would like some easy to use software for myself and clients.

I have tried greymatter,. it was really bad.

Wordpress is very good in my opinion. I use it on http://experts.knowledge-finder.com and I am impressed, especially by its ease of use and its ability to catch comment spam (which greymatter is really bad at).

incrediblehelp · #30 (**permalink**) 03-24-2005, 02:48 PM

Thanks all.

buttonb · #31 (**permalink**) 03-27-2007, 06:31 PM

Does anyone know of any business examples that have good blogs? I'm looking for firms who sell products (not services) and that are in the industrial fields.

I'm in manufacturing, and trying to decide if a blog is a good fit for us. I just can't imagine that commercial sewing is really that interesting, hence, why would we start a blog?

zidit · #32 (**permalink**) 04-30-2009, 11:59 PM

How many people search per month through this keyword 'business world'?In my opinion - not much

3dmagicaldesigns · #33 (**permalink**) 05-01-2009, 12:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Linda Buquet

CRich said:
I second that! Search Engines L O V E blogs, and that's why I have a new obsession with blogging.

Totally agree, I am just starting to promote my wordpress blog, in fact it became my home page ( please don't review it yet, I have uploaded a test and will be giving it the final finishes over the weekend), the fact is, my popularity is increasing and I've been able to promote my website on many other places since I started with my blog-home page. I know that I will have very good results in the upcoming months.

zidit · #34 (**permalink**) 05-02-2009, 06:50 AM

I think this blog is quality blog and people come up with happy to this blog. So traffice to this blog is the good traffic and in google view (Actually is my view) this is a quality site. And should rank well although this is just a free blog.

kgun · #35 (**permalink**) 05-02-2009, 07:30 AM

Please read the forum guidelines before making a new post.

MichaelB · #36 (**permalink**) 05-18-2009, 01:43 AM

Blogs are awesome! So much content, so much freshness, everything about a blog screams SEO. Come to think of it, I don't see any content sites survive these days unless they are a blog. The whole community, commenting, and new posts is what search engines and people love!

lookat · #37 (**permalink**) 05-18-2009, 03:55 AM

Blogging is one of the most important tool to optimize your site in Search Engine

innominds · #38 (**permalink**) 05-22-2009, 01:37 AM

It seems for every business website, blog is a must have. Customers or visitors are first searching for blogs than for contact us page. Through blogs, one can easily interact with the customers or potential customers.

jordy3738 · #39 (**permalink**) 05-22-2009, 02:02 AM

My blog posts sky rocket to the top of my niche. Within a couple of minutes they are indexed from the ping. SEO steroids is what they are like rocket fuel in a VW Bug.

bobpeter · #40 (**permalink**) 05-22-2009, 01:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by divicohen

I would like to know if all blogs are equal?

I saw maybe 10-15 different blog sites,
blogger, manila, blogdrive, blogontheweb,webbloger and list goes on and on,

which one will be better , if I would like to start a blog ?

thanks

if you go with self hosted blog.. then I would say wordpress + headspace + seo images will drive you lots of traffic.. if you have unique contents on your website..

btw headspace and seo images are wordpress plugins

ajay0547 · #41 (**permalink**) 05-25-2009, 04:41 AM

You are correct, with blogs you can form your own followers waiting for any new posts.

kevsta · #42 (**permalink**) 05-25-2009, 05:45 AM

they definitely do rank very well without needing expertise thats for sure

microsofts free websites - Google Search - still first page, and was above MS themselves for ages, until they reoptimized for the term, no work done on keeping it there by us whatsoever for more than a year.

yes I know its not competitive but this is a PR3 humor blogspot blog, it shouldnt be outranking MS for their own products, and it did for ages.

attention america - Google Search - #1 for ages, again with no work at it.

innominds · #43 (**permalink**) 05-27-2009, 09:37 PM

The blog sites have refreshing content so that may be the reason for its SEO power.

m.furqan.latif · #44 (**permalink**) 06-28-2009, 01:53 PM

That's all good to criticize someone's article, but back it up. I dont see anything about your experience with blogs NOT ranking well - since most of the posters here say they do. I'd like to see some evidence that they don't rank well at all. Anyone?

I really haven't tried it much at all - but I'd like to see if anyone got bad results?

By the way, your methodology is faulty. A check on Overture for "business world" means nothing. I've seen keywords appear one month and disappear the next.

jayman · #45 (**permalink**) 07-22-2009, 12:02 AM

I prefer to utilize others blogs that are on topic. I just got someone's site BACK IN Google because they had an off-site blog linking too many times over to their site.

cifstriud · #46 (**permalink**) 12-23-2009, 08:07 PM

whoa... a simple post and so many responses and links. My apologies for not doing the search first, that was stupid of me. Thanks for all the pointers, though!

LOL I thought I read that somewhere before,.... didn't someone find loose wire connectors and chicken bones in their box.

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