Blogs are becoming a widely used means of publishing information on the web. They can be used to send general information or as a marketing tool to promote products and services. The blog format has been around for years, but its usage is still evolving.
The most important feature of blogs is that they are rich in content. Most blogs consist of a series of posts that are entered on a regular basis. These posts may be short references (connected by links) to other resources on the web, or they may be articles or essays on a specific topic in nature, with references to other relevant resources on the web. It can also be a long embedded post. This makes it ideal for authors, reporters, journalists and marketers who want to systematically report on current activities, daily news or product characteristics.
For example, blogs are widely used by Chinese bloggers to comment on the local political and economic scene. They are used in most parts of the world by political advocates who want to speak out. They are used by journalists as an alternative medium to convey their experiences and ideas without being screened by large publishers. Corporate spokespeople also use blogs to communicate with employees and customers by posting company news and commentary on developments within their company or industry.
It is also increasingly used by marketers who want to promote certain products and improve the search engine rankings of their particular website. If you have a website or are promoting a website on behalf of a client, placing a link in your blog post is a very good way to get the attention of search engines.
Blogs and Search Engines
Blogs are a useful marketing tool because major search engines draw a lot of attention to them. Because blogs are easily spiderable due to their structure, major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) -- I tend to see them as sources of "news". The more active your blog is, the more often you get spider attacks. If there is a new post every day on the blog, it will be spidered every day, and in a day he may be spidered more than once.
This means that active blog information appears in search engine indexes much faster than changes made to a regular static website. Many people believe that simple changes to their website, such as posting a message on their homepage, can get them caught by search engines. But it's not. Search engines can only reflect this change after the site has been spidered. Also, unless a website has a history of continuous updates, search engines will find it only occasionally.
So when it comes to influencing search engines, a blog can serve two useful functions. First, as we have seen, active blogs are regularly spidered. So, as long as the blog is active, bloggers can regularly visit it from search engines to see what is being reported. New posts are quickly indexed and appear in search engine results.
Two important conclusions about blogging
First, if you want something to be reflected quickly in search engines, blogging about it is the best way to achieve that goal.
Second, search engines follow links, so it's a good idea to put links in your blog posts to other websites you want to draw attention.
