Search Engines Love Blogs
February 10th, 2006 -
Blogs entries are occupying more and more real estate in the search engine results. Certainly for anybody paying attention this is no surprise. Hence you see many companies starting up corporate blogs to take advantage of this (which I will dive into a bit later). Why are the search engines filled with so many blog results?
- Blog posts are text heavy. Every sequence of words is an opportunity to show up in the search results. The more text, the more potentially unique or lightly used sequence of words. Combine this with fact that the average searcher is tending to use longer and longer search phrases and there are simply more opportunities for blog entries.
- Unique Titles - Most blogging platforms create unique titles based on the post title. The title is then reinforced by the post heading. Of course the text in the article relates to the title and reinforces the subject matter as well.
- Fresh Content - New pages in an existing site tend to show up well when they first appear in the results and then drop. People like fresh content. So does Google.
- Easy navigation paths to the content. Blogs tend to have easy navigation to archived posts and multiple navigation paths as well (via archive links, categories links, cross links to other recent posts, popular posts). This makes it easy for the Spiders to find and index the content.
- The titles show up as links to the individual post page throughout must blogging platforms. This brings in the Google concept of “Anchor Text” which is the dominating factor in the Google algorithm…again bringing extreme focus to the keywords in the title of the post.
- Linking across blogs is a way of life in the Blogosphere. Good blogs are part of communities with other related blogs. They tend to link to each other, either via citing posts or through blog rolls. They naturally build PageRank and keyword relevance from the anchor text when individual posts are cited.
- They tend to have simple URL structures which are easy for the search engines to follow. Wordpress has a plugin (which I haven’t yet installed on this Blog) which will use the post Title to construct the URL - again, more focus on the keywords!
If you are blog writer and you want your content to be found, the most important thing you can do is pay attention to is the title. I’ll write more about the subject of choosing a title shortly!