"Why Blogs Have Become the Search Engine Optimization Equalizer"
By Hunter Waterhouse

 ALEXA WEIGHS IN...

For those who are unaware of Alexa, it offers an interesting tool to webmasters. The service is designed to value websites based on the number of people who visit those sites and the activities of those people while they are on a site.

Keep in mind that their results are skewed to the activities of those who use the Alexa toolbar. If your website is Business-to- Business oriented, then the results may be useful to your needs. If your site is Business-to-Customer oriented, then the Alexa results are far from accurate in documenting the importance of your website.

The reason why the Alexa results are skewed to the Business-to- Business market is because most people using the Alexa toolbar are involved in Business-to-Business activities, either as an user or provider of B2B services.

On May 24, 2005, Alexa's ranking of the Top Ten English Language websites were as follows:

* http://www.yahoo.com
* http://www.msn.com
* http://www.google.com
* http://www.passport.net
* http://www.ebay.com
* http://www.microsoft.com
* http://www.amazon.com
* http://www.fastclick.com
* http://www.google.co.uk
* http://www.aol.com

( This info came from: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 )

WHAT EIGHT OF THE TOP TEN WEBSITES ALL HAVE IN COMMON

Sure, five of these top ten sites are search oriented sites, but that is not the answer.

Passport.net is owned by Microsoft and must be accessed when someone is logging into the msn.com network. Fastclick.com is a site that helps advertisers buy advertising across a huge network of sites. These two sites do not fit the profile.

The one thing that eight of our top ten sites have in common is that they are content driven destinations and they add new, original, and exclusive content on a daily basis.

BLOGS ARE THE GREAT EQUALIZER

Blogs are the great equalizer because they simplify the task of adding content to a website on a daily or weekly basis. They make it simple for the average joe to add content to their site on a daily basis with just a few clicks of the mouse.

What is more, the spider search engine companies recognize this and make it a point to spider the blog networks on a regular basis, sometimes a daily basis.

It may take a spider search engine up to three months to spider your site if you go directly to their submission page to add your domain to their database. On the other hand, with a blog, you can put a story about your domain on a blog with a link to your domain, and your website can generally get crawled within a week or so of putting your link on the blog.

BLOGS REQUIRE A COMMITMENT ON YOUR PART

Daily additions to your blog should be your goal. If you do not have time to do daily additions, you should at worst do a weekly addition to your blog.

Just like in the real world of websites, if you don't update your blog on a regular basis, the spiders will save their time and resources by not spidering your blog on a daily basis. If however you do update on a daily or near daily basis, then the spiders will visit your blog with the same fervor you bring to your blog.

Additionally, it sometimes seems like the search engine spiders are giving some addition weight to the results culled from the blogs. The point in this additional weighting is that blogs are filled with personal comments and recommendations rather than sales pitches.

BLOGS ARE EASY TO SET UP, EVEN FOR THE RANK AMATEUR

There are in fact several blog programs available that you can either load into your own domain or that you can use from a third-party, remotely-hosted server.

To see a list of the blogging programs that are available, check out this link:

http://keywordtext.com/redir/blog-list

My personal favorite is http://www.blogger.com which happens to be owned by Google. Blogger allows you the ability to use the software from their servers or to integrate the blog software into your own site with very little effort on your part.

I was able to integrate their software into our own site and to customize the display of the blogger to fit our domain's format, and I was able to pull that task off in just about 30 minutes --- with most of that time dedicated to the custom display of our blog.

Add to the simplicity of setting up the blog, the fact that since blogger.com is owned by Google.com, they will always be very keen to spider our blog on a regular basis.

From launch of our website, to the spidering of our site by Google took just about ten days. Within three days of the launch of our site, Google had spidered the main page of our site. Within ten days, Google had already spidered the whole of our website.

Compared to other websites we have launched, this was the fastest turn-around time from new release to traffic from the search engines. We believe the difference in this case study had to do more with the addition of the blog on the day of our launch than anything else we may have done to promote our domain.

EQUALIZE YOUR SITE WITH THE SITES OF THE BIG BOYS

The big sites on the internet got to be that way because they consistently add new, original, and exclusive content to their websites.

While you and I may never have as much content on our sites as the big boys do, we can benefit from the lessons they teach to us.

Now that you have also learned this important lesson, it is time to put this knowledge into action. Make it part of your daily or weekly schedule to add fresh, interesting content to your website. Your banker will thank you.