There has always been a great deal of debate around Search Engines and how they rank web pages in response to searches carried out by their users. What there is no debate about is that fact that appearing high up in Search Engines Results page has become critical for most businesses as Search Engines have become the preferred research tools in today’s marketplace.

As a result, Search Engine Optimisation (aka SEO) has become an established business as companies and individuals look to get greater visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs). SEO companies in turn have arrived on the scene to make web pages more “attractive” to Search Engines (and hence rank more highly) by giving them focus and using techniques to include as many of the key ranking elements as possible.

What has also become clear is that Blogs (and Business Blogs in particular) tend to rank highly in the Search Engines, making them an important or even key part of Search Engine Marketing. To understand why, first let’s have a quick reminder of how Search Engines work.

How Search Engines work: a few basics

The main Search Engines (I’m thinking here of Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live) gather information on websites by sending out automatic robots or spiders to index sites, which collect the information that the pages contain and register them. They do this by following links and then reading and retrieving the code which creates the individual pages (and hence the text they contain) which is then saved on their servers. Then, when a search is submitted, the Search Engine searches for all the relevant pages in its index and then ranks them in terms of relevancy using a mathematical algorithm. This is what we see on the Search Engine results page.

They determine this relevancy using about 100 different criteria, according to informed opinion. Among these, there are certain elements which are considered more valuable than the rest: this is the text itself, the inbound and internal links, recency of the information and some key onpage elements such as the Title tag. It is also worth re-iterating that search engines rank individual pages rather than whole websites when they create their results pages.

So how can we apply this to blogs?

Armed with what we know about what Search Engines are looking for to rank pages highly, we can see that Blogs do in fact fulfil a number of these criteria perfectly which goes a long way to explain why they rank so well:

• Text: Business Blogs tend to be focused in their content and that is ideal for what Search Engines look for when they are searching for pages which fit with specific search criteria;
• External Inbound Links: the overriding philosophy in the blogosphere is to reference other blogs by linking to relevant sources; so blogs offering good (and often specific) content are likely to attract a greater number of links;
• Internal Links: blogs are automatically structured in such a way that the internal linking is excellent with highly relevant anchor text (the words that actually form the link) which is an extra bonus;
• Up to date information: the most successful blogs are generally ones which are regularly updated and hence offer a growing resource of recent and relevant content;
• Onpage elements: good blogging software has excellent flexibility which gives you the opportunity to have specific onpage elements (such as the Title Tag) for each individual page.

Conclusion: keep developing your Business Blog

For those of us who already use blogs from a business perspective, these Search Engine benefits will not be news - no doubt you will have already have seen the type of results that you can achieve. They are particularly impressive when you consider that hopefully you write and promote your blog with other aims in mind and these benefits are merely a welcome (albeit very beneficial) side effect.

Business blogs however are not a magic solution and nor should they be used in isolation - they are at their best when used in conjunction with other marketing activities, both online and offline. Equally, they are not trying to manipulate Search Engines which is an accusation sometimes levelled at SEO companies. Simply put, well written and focused blogs give Search Engines exactly what they want to provide for their users – good, specific and up to date information on the subject matter that they are searching for.

And providing that is of course where both the challenge and the benefits lay!

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