Search Engine Marketing for Beginning Bloggers

What is Search Engine Marketing?

A well written and tightly focused blog will create a traffic bonanza of high quality visitors. Blogs are generally tight center and focused on a topic and several related topics.

Search engine marketing is simply getting your blog and your blog content a high enough ranking in the search engines for your keywords so that your content will generate visitors to your site from search results pages (SERPs). Compelling site and content titles and descriptions help compel users to click on your links in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and visit you.

Search engine marketing requires a search engine optimized web site. This is a web site that displays a configuration that makes it very attractive to search engine spiders. The spiders will visit your site and crawl your content. When they do this they pick up your keywords and determine what your page is about. That content goes back to the search engines and get indexed.

When people type in the keywords you are using then your pages will show in the search results. The idea is to get your pages ranking high enough to get traffic to your site. It is better to be on for top results instead of bottom results. For example, showing up positions 1 through 30 is much better than positions 800 to 1000 in Google.

Why Blogs Enhance Search Engine Marketing

In times past only the big media and news sites carried frequently updating content in the form of breaking news headlines and content. The search engines would pound away at these sites because they were designated as sources for the freshest content to be found on the Internet. Now blogs are creating millions of mini news sites or micro content hubs with rich information and links. Bloggers update their content frequently with all manner of late breaking information. Blog have outpaced mainstream media outlets in their ability to get information out to the masses faster.

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Search engines specifically target blogs as another huge source of high value, fresh and highly relevant information and they want it as fast as you can publish it! The more frequently you publish, the more visits you will get from Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.

Here is what you should realize about your blog relationship with search engines. Blogs are search engine magnets and they get crawled often and deeply by search engine spiders. This means you get your content into Google in hours and days rather than weeks and months.

You don't have to go to Google or Yahoo!, submit your site and then wait for 2 to 3 months before you start to see yourself showing up among the rankings. Nope that's old school.

Can you guess what business the search engines are in? That's right! They are in business are delivering the most accurate and relevant information in their search results as possible. They know that if they don't deliver relevant content in their search results, users will stop using them and start using a different search engine. As far as the search engines are concerned, YOU are THEIR customer. They want to deliver a quality product to you. Their product is "relevant search results".

Blog are new sources of quality content and because blogs updated frequently (or should be!), the search engine spiders literally are programmed to visit your blog based on how often you publish fresh content on your blog. You can actually accelerate or ramp up the spider algorithm as you must frequently and regularly. Think of the algorithm as the program logic that helps the spider determine how often it should visit your blog. You can improve your chances for good rankings by simply publishing more content, more often!

This is why if you are using a regular web site you are being whooped in the search engines rankings game. A regular web site that is not published frequently simply cannot keep up or catch with blog content that ranks easily and quickly for search engine results pages. Blogs are natural search engine optimization tools and the search engines are prepared to read your content often and take it back for indexing and ranking. If you have a product, a service or any marketing skill or knowledge and you don't have a blog...you are missing the boat.

When you get your content ranked well you can market your message because you now have visibility for your target audience. Your keywords are those words that your customer or prospect has in mind when the are searching for something you have to offer. When toys, clothes or cars, your content to contain the keywords your target audience is using in their search efforts.

How Blogs Rank Well In Search Engine Results

Blogs rank well for several good reasons.

1. Blogs are by their very design meet the current requirements for search engines and search traffic. Search engines need to deliver the latest information accurately and search engine traffic wants the most accurate information now. Blogs are highly relevant in their niches and are the best sources online right now for the most update to date information.

2. Blogs can be naturally keyword optimized for even greater appeal to search engines. But using your keywords judiciously through your blog design and blog content, you can easily rank for those keywords in the search engines without gimmicks or search engine tricks. You literally begin to "rank as your write".

3. Blogs are text rich publishing tools. What do I mean by text rich? Blogs using light weight code by comparison to regular websites. Blogs are styled and formation with cascading style sheets, PHP along with moderate use of HTML for the most part. There are some variations in underlying code depending on the blog software you use but the point is that blogs do not contain lots of extra and poorly formatted HTML code, or lots of javascript and images. Blogs are designed to share code and components behind the scenes so that your design doesn't get in the way of your content.

This makes your content much more visible to the search engines and the search engine spiders that crawl your blog frequently can also crawl your content faster and see your content with greater clarity. This makes for for easy interpretation of what your blog is talking about. Lots of javascript, flash animations and over used HTML code makes hinders your content from being seen at all (javascript and flash) to rather difficult to interpret (too much extra code or poorly formatted pages). While you don't need to really bother with all this behind the scenes stuff, just know that blogs are text rich publishing tools and search engines love text. All the other flashy stuff is for human appeal. Search engines appeal to pure text and blogs have that in spades.

4. Links are a persons best friend for search engines rankings. The more links you get the better. The more relevant the link then the more importance that link has for search engine results. Blogs naturally generate inbound links because in the world of blogs, content links to content every moment of the day. Great content is found by others in the world of blogs and linked to on a regular basis. Write good content and you will get good inbound links.

These inbounds are easily generated from sites with similar content and often contain relevant keywords in the linked text to your blog. All of this means better rankings for you in the search engines with little effort spent trying to build back links and link partnerships. As a practice you should link to other content as well when you publish. This creates outbound links and when you link to other content with relevant keywords in the linked text this also creates a stronger relevancy rating for your blog content. Remember to be natural and don't force the use of keywords of linked text any more so than you would use your keywords throughout your blog and content.

The result for you as a beginning blogger is a nice niched themed content site that is also a rich hub of inbound and outbound links. Another bonus for using a blog.

Conclusion

These are just a few reasons why blogs are good for search engine marketing. Blogs naturally appeal to the algorithm of search engine spiders. In other words they have exactly what search engine spiders are programmed to look for. In the past, producing themed site content that was rich in keywords and also had good links and navigation took more effort using a regular web site.

Blogs allow you to publish easily and instantly and at the same time you can easily produce a site that gives you the best chance of ranking well for search engine traffic with less of an effort. You don't have to focus on content management at all. You configure your blog software once for greatest appeal to the search engines and from that moment forward you can strictly focus on producing quality content. Your blog will do the rest for you.

To recap...Blogs are natural search engine optimization tools. The search engines love blogs and they crawl them frequently looking for great products (your content in search results) to take back and sell to their customers (that's you and I when we do searches).

Blogs are crawled more frequently when they are updated frequently. This means that when you publish a steady stream of great content and you publish it often your content will get crawled often. This results in your content potentially being indexed much quicker as well as ranking much higher for relevancy and freshness.

A regular web site requires more time and effort to organize and manage content for keyword optimization, navigation and building links. All of which are important for effective search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Blog software manages your content automatically and allows you to focus on publishing good content. This is a time savings for you and gives you a clear advantage for generating traffic to your blog and getting your message in front of visitors.

A regular web site cannot compete against a blog because a regular web site is not published as often as blog content normally is nor can it be managed as efficiently as a blog. Regular web sites are slow but blogs are fast!

© 2005
T. L. Pakii Pierce
Blog Publisher

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