Blogs deserve places in search engines

Ranking high in the search engine results is essential for the visiblity of web sites.



Being ranked Number One, for your most important keywords, is the Holy Grail for most web sites.



Blogs are no exception.



Fortunately for blogs, they are almost custom made to Google's specifications.



Google considers incoming links to be extremely important in calculating the PageRank of a web site. Links are also strongly considered in Google's algorithm for positioning sites in the search results.



Since bloggers are natural and almost obsessive linkers, Google's algorithm was seemingly written with blogs in mind.



The same holds true for content. It's said that on the internet, "content is king". If that's indeed the case, then blogs truly hold the keys to the search engine kingdom.



The search engines send out their robot spiders, to crawl the web, searching for freshly updated web pages. Since many traditional web sites are "static", and rarely get any fresh material added, they don't change. The Googlebot, and the other search engine spiders, will find no compelling reason to visit regular sites more than about once a month.



Since bloggers update their blogs regularly (often several times a day), Google's spider will be crawling them often. Search engine spiders crawl many of the most frequently posted blogs on a daily basis.



It seems that regular updating, as part of the Google methodology, was again almost written with blogging in mind. Blogs have merely played within the rules as set out by the various search engines; Google included.



Of course, the bloggers' search engine success is not without its critics, and some attacks.



Traditionalists who refuse to differentiate between news, business and informational blogs on the one hand, and online diaries on the other, are crying foul. That confusion may in fact be intentional, to cloud the real issue. If the standard web site can't compete with blogs, they want to change the rules.



Static web sites are not always holding their own in the search engine results.



If not updated regularly, the standard web sites fall behind. Failing to have a good linking policy hurts the mainstream sites as well. To counter the blog assault on their exalted positions, traditional webmasters are clamouring for Google to remove blogs from the search results. Failing that, they want blogs indexed separately.



That is a fallacy.



It's also an afront to the quality of material offered by the blogs. Since the best blogs choose to provide good information, in the form of many well written articles, it's only proper the search engines would rank them highly. Google and others have already decided which blogs are delivering the goods, in terms of their search results.



Search engine algorithms take into account the relevance of the keywords on a web site. Blogs are often heavily keyword specific. The bloggers are providing the proper "spider food" for the search engines as they come crawling.



Google takes into consideration incoming links in calculating PageRank. The more links the better. The more highly ranked the linking site the better. Again, blogs are playing by the rules of the game. Only better!



There's the rub!



Blogs are what the internet was supposed to be from the beginning. Interlocking links of information, flowing freely from site to site, was the initial dream. Tradtional web sites have lost some of that vision.



Blogs are making that dream a greater reality.



Your business blog is just what the internet ordered!