Do you have a website? If so, you need an ROR XMLNS code button which leads to a full ROR/RDF code page for your website. This code tells search engines all about the special details you input into the code about your website. For example, it tells them special details about each particular product (or certain special ones) that you sell on your site or sites, it tells the search engine bots your contact information such as your business address and phone number (without informing the entire universe, as the code is invisible to all but you and the search engine bots examining your website), it gives info on special other links you want the search engine bots to associate with your website, and it gives any other such major info that you want the big search engines to explore and know all about from your website.
That's why you need this latest and greatest in Internet code technology: the ROR/RDF XMLNS code. It's a form of XML that doesn't validate like an RSS or Atom feed does; it validates through the RDF Validation Service. You can look that up on the Net, and you'll see what I mean. Meanwhile, there's the matter of the Really Simple Syndication and the Atom XML codes. These codes DO validate through RSS Validation sites as regular feed codes. These codes, also known as feeds, can be taken by people visiting your website and input into their own RSS and Atom feed readers, such as RSS Reader (which you can download for free off of their website) and other news aggregators and feed readers.
These codes are great for spreading news on your website around. Basically, they each introduce important parts of your website -- or even your whole site in its entirety -- if you choose that you want to spread every page around to the general public through what's normally known as news and blog aggregation readers and services. You can find these services on websites all over the Web, and they're rapidly gaining in use and popularity. A good example of such a service is the NewsIsFree website, a news aggregator. These services usually take news feeds of all kinds and some blogs, plus they're starting to take advertisement feeds. This latter portion is a bit of a worry due to the fact that spyware and adware can thus be passed in a widespread manner all around the WWW.
This is being looked into very seriously by the experts. Most people are concerned that RSS will be used like a tool for this, so please be careful about copying RSS advertisement feeds into your news or blog feeds aggregator. The news and the normal daily or weekly expression blog feeds should be perfectly safe, for now. You should be able to scan RSS and Atom feeds for all types of malware someday in the not too distant future.
The RSS and Atom feeds are attached generally to little tiny orange buttons labeled 'XML' and nothing more. Sometimes Atom feeds are attached to little blue buttons labeled 'ATOM'. The buttons are less than half an inch long and only a few centimeters wide, and would be very hard to see if it weren't for their bright coloration. The type they sport is a bright white, too. Some services are starting to use slightly larger and more visible but similar buttons for their particular XML-related services. The ROR/RDF XMLNS buttons are a little bigger, being an inch long, but are the same thickness as the RSS/Atom buttons and are half orange and half grey. They say 'ROR' in the orange portion and 'INFO' on the grey side, off-center. They also have a light yellow line around each portion and the margin of the button, plus the type is a light yellow, making them a bit easier to see without being so brightly colored. They're mostly placed visibly on your site in order to boast that you now sport ROR/RDF code on your website.
You can go ahead and even input the code directly into your site without ever bothering to use one of the colorful but dull ROR buttons. Just upload the code in an ror.xml text file into the root directory of the site. You will have to do this whether you show the button or not, anyway, and you also have to do this in the case of the RSS and Atom codes. They upload as feed.xml and atom.xml or something very similar to that in most cases. There is some leeway when assigning the filenames to these special XML codes, but they have to be uploaded as text files into your website's root directory. You might, however, want to display one or more of the ROR buttons on your website, preferably on your site map or home page, as this button is solely there so that search engines can pick up valuable information you want to share with them about your website.
The more such links you have, the more often major search engine bots will pick up on them, you see. So we advise you to proudly display that you have ROR/RDF code on your website. If you would like to know more about these fascinating codes, please contact Rainbow Writing, Inc. at karencole@rainbowriting.com for more information. Also, we can readily build you any or each of these codes for a small fee. We hereby suggest you definitely get at least an ROR code for your website to raise your rankings in the search engines, or to keep them high, and an RSS code for a website feed for your valuable website or websites. Remember that you can hook up more than one website in a single feed or one ROR/RDF file code. This is one thing that makes these special codes so popular and valuable to users.
You will see little tiny, colorful buttons on several of the websites you are visiting nowadays, especially the major company ones. Probably, you've already seen them, and now you know what they are! Pretty soon nobody will be able to do without these little 'pill' buttons to advertise all of the services they have to offer their commercial or even their personal public. Sound like a fair deal? Write us ASAP at karencole@rainbowriting.com and we'll get cracking on generating perfect, simple, streamlined and fully validatable (that means it completely functions) code for you.
We believe a professional should do this for you, but if you have the time, there are website tutorials on the Net that show you how to slowly or swiftly learn, depending on your speed, how to write validatable XML code. This can be quite complicated, so we are highly recommending that you use our services. Please write to us today and see exactly what we can do for you in the realm of authoring these somewhat complicated yet streamlined and enormously useful XML codes.
POSTSCRIPT: Nowadays you also need a Google Sitemap for your website to make it properly Google-friendly. This is an xml code page that will list every change you make to any page of your website, and it's called a sitemap code. Google will reindex your site daily, weekly or monthly based on the information it gets from your sitemap. We can save you the trouble and build you one of those for a very low price, as well as any of the other codes mentioned above.
Executive Director and President of Rainbow Writing, Inc., Karen Cole-Peralta writes. RWI at http://www.rainbowriting.com/ is a world renowned freelance writing, copyediting, ghostwriting, graphics and CAD, search engine optimization, publishing helpers, internet marketing, free professional services, and supercheap dedicated web host and website development corporation.
The Bible says, 'My people perish from lack of knowledge.' This is also true in the technical world of search engine marketing. Your lack of understanding of how search engines find websites can be detrimental to your success. In effect, you could lose your website investment, and lose again by not being at the top of the engines later. If your website is built and written correctly, you will experience a positive return on your website investment that pays dividends for years to come.
Before you start correcting the website content created for you by The Marketing Shop, or any webmaster experienced in SEO, make sure you have a firm grasp of search engine optimization. If you have a question about something that looks peculiar, ask your designer before you spend too much time fretting. Chances are--if it's on your website--it's there for a purpose.
Writing a website is a delicate balance between pleasing people and computers. Strike the right balance and you'll find your website at the top of the search engines, converting your website traffic into loyal clients. Miss the mark and your site will be in no man's land without a word to say.
Here's a few things to know about search engine optimization before reading your website content for the first time:
Keywords are Paramount. If your website does not have the keyword content that people are using for search, it will not show up in search results, period. This is not quantum physics. Computers are machines. They can only pick up text. It's crucial that we analyze what people are typing into the search engines and build your website content accordingly.
Keyword Research is Necessary. The Marketing Shop performs extensive keyword research for all our web marketing clients. We want to know exactly what people are typing in what into the search engines to find products and services like yours. Based upon our expertise in search engine optimization, we determine the best keywords and phrases to optimize on your site. We have many different calculations that we use to determine which keywords to optimize for and rest assured we've done our homework on the best keywords for the current development phase of your website.
Headings Must Be Search Engine Optimized. The headings of your website impact your website search engine optimization. It is important that they read in a precise way in order for you to 'score points' with the search engines and rank higher in search results. There are at least three levels of headings (h1, h2 and h3). If you're keywords aren't here, your page won't be optimized.
We try to maintain a balance by writing headings that are search engine optimized, and compelling for the reader. A headline sets up the structure of the page and entices people to read further. We try to do both wherever possible.
Your Page Layout Must Be Search Engine Optimized. Everything about your website must be optimized for search or you may loose valuable opportunities to gain new customers. Our websites have generally the same layout because our research has shown the layout to be most effective for SEO. While there are probably many better ways to layout your website, we prefer the way that the search engines prefer in effort to attract website traffic.
Your Navigation Will Make or Break Your Search Rankings. The navigation on your website is integral to your website for a variety of reasons. First, it contains links that help the search engine spiders get to where they need to go on your site. Second, it contains keywords that help your website get indexed for search queries.
We strive to create intuitive and easy to use navigation systems that are search engine optimized. Much thought goes into the creation of your navigation. Though it may see strange, your navigation is built for search engines and people. Whenever possible, we will add keywords and key phrases to each and every link of your navigation. Here's some bizarre things you may encounter on your SEO navigation:
Repetition Keywords: It's important to put keywords everywhere, including the navigation system. Not only do the keywords score points for being there, but the link itself scores double points for linking to the page it's linking to.
Re-Phrasing of Terminology: Sometimes we will need to breakdown the way you phrase something in order to make it match with what people are searching for in the search engines. If our research shows that people are not searching for a given term, we will change it to suit the search queries of the customers you want to win.
Localization is A Sticky Situation. Many of The Marketing Shop website clients are those seeking web marketing in a local vicinity. We do our best to bring you customers only from the area you request. However, there are times when our keyword research concludes that people are just not searching for your local area and we have to optimize more broadly. If this is the case, rest assured that targeting the broader area will still render results in your local area due to our expertise in local web marketing.
Each Page is Only Optimized for One or Two Phrases. The most successful web pages for search engines are optimized for only one or two keyword phrases. That means the title is about one thing and the page contains the same keywords sprinkled throughout with plenty of links reflecting the same keywords too.
Images are Invisible to Search Engines. If you were expecting a website to be a lead-generator that has more visual appeal and aesthetic stimulation, please reconsider. Images are invisible to search engines. Studies also show that people want information when they come on the web as opposed to a colorful 'website brochure.'
Content is King. Content is king for a variety of reasons including for search engine optimization, for website conversion enhancement and for inclusion into Google.
Search Engines: Search engines can read only text. It makes sense to keep fresh, relevant content on your site for search engine crawlers.
Website Conversion Enhancement: People are on the web to get information, not to read brochures. The more information you provide for them, the 'stickier' your website becomes and the more people will bookmark your site and rely on it for pertinent information. (See article on web content.)
Also, people who get free and valuable information from your website are more likely to rely and depend upon you when they're ready to purchase goods and services. It's a 'give before you get' mentality that really works. Offer information and your website visitors will reward you with loyalty.
Another way good web content affects your website's conversion capabilities is by showing your clients how you operate. Your web content is very telling as to the goods and services you provide. If you skimp on your content and your competitor does not, your competitor will win the business. Your prospects may wonder why you're not offering adequate information. Do you not know what you're doing? Do you have something to hide? Will you skimp later? It's best to just ante up the info immediately.
Google has strict requirements for it's top search result contenders, including inclusion in the DMOZ. The DMOZ is a human edited directory that requires unique and informative content as a barrier to entry. We're in the Information Age, time to step it up and provide useful information.
The World is Changing and Your Customer is Well Informed. Why bother creating websites that are valuable to our website visitors? Because your customer is different today than ever before. Information is readily available to everyone. The person who gives out information most efficiently is the one people will rely on to do business with in the future. Customers are well informed, savvy and able to get information at the click of a mouse. We need to step out of the box and cater to the new consumer.
SEO Sites Can be Tacky. There are websites out there that try to capitalize on knowledge of search engine optimization by adding keywords flagrantly and abusing the system. The Marketing Shop will never do that as we rely only on ethical search engine optimization techniques. We care more about people than we do about search engine rankings. The only time we'll put machines over people is when it's very important to the overall SEO success of your website. Other times, we try to appeal human visitors most of all.
Conclusion Before you get started, make sure you understand what it takes to get to the top of the search engines. Good foundational knowledge in SEO will help your site be more successful, and save your web designer and SEO professional a ton of headaches in trying to get you to understand what's what. Please understand that The Marketing Shop will do nothing to your website without having a good reason for doing so. Please ask questions before you get frustrated.
Jennifer Ryan is the CEO of Dallas web design firm, The Marketing Shop. She is a web promotions and sales expert as well as a successful published author and copywriter. Jennifer holds her bachelors degree in Christian Ministry and Business Management from Dallas Baptist University. Having earned numerous awards, recognition and financial success in sales, Jennifer now sells Dallas web design services to businesses worldwide. Visit http://www.the-marketing-shop.com today to sign up for her monthly newsletter (generous with free tips and advice!)
Do you know what is the most important question among most internet marketers specially newbie�s. It�s 'How to get highly targeted visitors to there site?' Believe me, I know it because I received this question from my subscribers almost daily. Well, earlier when I started my internet business I also faced this problem. I tried safe-lists, I bought so called guaranteed visitors, even I blast my ad to 10 million (Yes, you are right. It�s 10 million) sites but couldn�t make a single sale.
Than I changed my strategies and get this problem solved by finding a right solution, and that is 'Pay Per Click Advertising'. Pay Per Click Advertising is a great solution for traffic worries which directs a highly targeted traffic to my site. Yesterday only I got around 280 visitors and I made 24 sales.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a 'per-click' basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are pros and cons. Where there are flowers there are thorns also. what you have to do is to protect yourself from thorns and let only the fragrance touch your inner sense. I am going to tell you advantages the Pay Per Click Advertising.
One of the greatest advantages of PPC is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you're up and running. It doesn't demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier - and more effective - the process will be.
Now came the very point in your mind that what is bad about Pay Per Click Advertising. The downside is that PPC is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position - which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.
In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 10000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.
Since when you are doing the business for earning money and you are losing a heavy part of it then you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.
The only way to assess your success in this field is monitoring, not only monitoring but careful monitoring. You can easily analyze it by visitor behavior which can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and pay-per-click campaign is a must for this.
Raamakant S. is owner of http://www.umtezine.com. Subscribe to his Ultimate marketing Tips eZine by sending a blank e-mail mailto:umtezine@getresponse.com -- Learn Everything You've Been Wanting to Know about Internet Marketing. REAL Tips, Tricks and Techniques You Can Use In Your Business and Consistently Produce MASSIVE Amounts of Profits.
It's no good having a creative, individual website with brilliant, informative copy if customers can't find you on the internet. On the other hand, it's also detrimental if you have a website that can be easily found (has a high ranking) but people become bored and alienated reading it.
Producing effective online copywriting is a creative process blending art and science in a balanced technique combining many different elements. This integration of disciplines is required to satisfy both the technical and the aesthetic objectives of a website.
Optimised online copywriting should ensure that your website is:
� highly readable to your viewers � highly visible to the search engines, and thereby � commercially successful for you.
Many people and businesses don't have the time to actually write web copy themselves. A professional freelance copywriter can furnish you with keyword-rich, highly original web content to enhance and improve the quality of your website with the aim of transforming more of your visitors into customers.
Rarely will you get a second chance to engage your customer's attention, so your first shot must be formatted for maximum sales potential, catching the eye of the search engine robots as well. But not too much� If your copy goes overboard in favour of the search engines it earn you a penalty from Google that will negatively effect your rankings. Your website must always have the reader as priority. This makes more business sense anyway.
Search engines provide a way for potential customers to find you on the internet. People type a keyphrase or keyword into a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo or MSN (or one of the many other popular engines) and this returns a page of listings - web page suggestions for that particular phrase or word. Obviously, you want your website to feature highly in this list.
Optimised online copywriting specifically targets the words and phrases people are using when searching for a product on the internet (Search Engine Marketing (SEM), keyword research). You want to make sure your website stays at the top of the listings so people go to your website before others. With targeted copy in place, search engines are more likely to index your web site on page one than if it does not include keyword-rich copy. This is an ever more important issue when dealing with Google, the leading search-engine today.
To rank highly in the search engines the words on your web pages should never be an afterthought, but should be included right at the beginning in the original design of your website. Content development is the most valuable asset web developers can utilise in the bid for productive, successful search engine optimisation and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Hiring a professional copywriter is a wise investment in your business future. Even if you don�t want to optimise your site you should make sure that the words on your site are reasonable, enticing, spelled correctly and artfully arranged to engage attention. Just because you can type letters or write some emails doesn't mean you can write the copy for your website. The writing on your homepage is often how people determine whether the website is a scam or the genuine article. Your website�s credibility takes a nose-dive if the spelling is wrong, or the grammar is incorrect, or it just reads like bad, clumsy English. People will be disinclined to trust your content.
Within the search engines new technologies and algorithms are being developed all the time to make search methodologies smarter, more astute. It's never a coincidence when someone types in a search phrase and your website is indexed highly on the page. Keyword rich online copywriting is a significant and critical component in gaining high rankings on the search engines.
Recently, Google has been pioneering a new trend of intelligent search engines which are not attracted by mere repetition of words throughout the text, but which look for meaning, attempting to make grammatical sense of the information, trying to understand what the web page is actually saying. This is forcing webmasters to improve the content on their web pages or suffer the consequences. The old saying has never been more relevant: 'content is king.'
Jackie Griffiths is Senior Copywriter at Freelance Copy UK:
http://www.freelance-copy.co.uk
...and loves her job! Copywriting Articles http://www.ezinegalaxy.com/copywriting/index.html
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the web. It is owned by 'Time Warner' and constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors, and is truly unique in many ways. The Open Directory, also known as DMOZ (the domain name of ODP), is a large, categorized directory of websites and pages, which is staffed by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. Since its index is manually constructed and edited, categorization and relevancy is superior to any other index of its kind and equally as unique, is the fact that this data is open and free to the public for replication. As of July 2005, ODP had about 4.6 million listings organized into over 580,000 categories derived from the contributions of some 69,000 editors.
How is this free data been used to make Dmoz Clone?
There are a lot of ODP scripts to make clone of the ODP. These scripts enables you to add live data of the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org to your own website using a very easy to customize template based system. Users can browse and search categories of websites. These scripts that grabs live contents of the Open Directory dynamically and formats them to make your own version of the Open Directory. These are small scripts have few files to just uploaded on your server and you can get Thousands of Dmoz directory pages on your site in your own templates design. These scripts just get live data from Dmoz.org and it has no original new contents.
Does Dmoz Clone bring traffic?
Webmaster do not like Dmoz clone websites as they have not original content rather have duplicate contents and no body will like to link a site or vote a site which has duplicate contents. Most people will not even browse your directory. Most people will just browse 2-10 pages of your directory, they will just leave and never come back.
Why Search Engines are against Dmoz Clone?
There are various reasons which are explained as: - There is no Original Content which is required to make a Quality Site. - Duplicate contents as all scripts extract live data from Dmoz and create thousands of similar pages on the web. - The Dmoz directory has more than 580,000 categories If thousands of site will grab the live contents from Dmoz it will results into creation of millions of similar pages which is making web a junkyard of similar pages with nothing new. - The Dmoz clone sites has thousands of pages created on fly with no extra hardwork and lot of spammer are using it for advertising or Google adsense program. - The lot of webmaster has just created a section of Dmoz to get inbound links from thousands of pages to increase link popularity and search engine ranking. - Text link advertiser also created Dmoz clone to sell links on thousands of pages to increase artificially link popularity of text link ads buyers.
Which kind of Dmoz clone Search Engine's will Like
Search engines are concerned with presenting quality results to there users If you can modify and enhance the data retrieved from Dmoz and present in unique format it will definitely be preferred by Search Engines, Webmaster and Web Surfers. Google has got its own directory for which it has got data from Dmoz but enhanced by Google technology i.e ranking of sites on each directory page by Page Rank.
Using ODP Clone Scripts just to make simple odp clone will get your site banned from search engines due to duplicate contents. Therefore it is advised not to use this virtually useless script on important sites or sites that rank well on search engines. Lot of ODP Clone Scripts makers sites were banned, because too many websites with duplicate content ( as they all have Dmoz clone) were linked to them. These scripts owner require there site URL to be linked at the footer as 'Powered by ...' Which results into link farming or inbound links from similar pages.
Therefore if you want your site or directory to be safe and run for longer times then have original and unique contents in it which will not only make it rank but also get good traffic on your site and increase its popularity.
The Article is written by Nameeta Kashyap Editor of Megri Web Directory(www.megri.com) and Team leader of Megrisoft
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the web. It is owned by 'Time Warner' and constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors, and is truly unique in many ways. The Open Directory, also known as DMOZ (the domain name of ODP), is a large, categorized directory of websites and pages, which is staffed by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. Since its index is manually constructed and edited, categorization and relevancy is superior to any other index of its kind and equally as unique, is the fact that this data is open and free to the public for replication. As of July 2005, ODP had about 4.6 million listings organized into over 580,000 categories derived from the contributions of some 69,000 editors.
How is this free data been used to make Dmoz Clone?
There are a lot of ODP scripts to make clone of the ODP. These scripts enables you to add live data of the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org to your own website using a very easy to customize template based system. Users can browse and search categories of websites. These scripts that grabs live contents of the Open Directory dynamically and formats them to make your own version of the Open Directory. These are small scripts have few files to just uploaded on your server and you can get Thousands of Dmoz directory pages on your site in your own templates design. These scripts just get live data from Dmoz.org and it has no original new contents.
Does Dmoz Clone bring traffic?
Webmaster do not like Dmoz clone websites as they have not original content rather have duplicate contents and no body will like to link a site or vote a site which has duplicate contents. Most people will not even browse your directory. Most people will just browse 2-10 pages of your directory, they will just leave and never come back.
Why Search Engines are against Dmoz Clone?
There are various reasons which are explained as: - There is no Original Content which is required to make a Quality Site. - Duplicate contents as all scripts extract live data from Dmoz and create thousands of similar pages on the web. - The Dmoz directory has more than 580,000 categories If thousands of site will grab the live contents from Dmoz it will results into creation of millions of similar pages which is making web a junkyard of similar pages with nothing new. - The Dmoz clone sites has thousands of pages created on fly with no extra hardwork and lot of spammer are using it for advertising or Google adsense program. - The lot of webmaster has just created a section of Dmoz to get inbound links from thousands of pages to increase link popularity and search engine ranking. - Text link advertiser also created Dmoz clone to sell links on thousands of pages to increase artificially link popularity of text link ads buyers.
Which kind of Dmoz clone Search Engine's will Like
Search engines are concerned with presenting quality results to there users If you can modify and enhance the data retrieved from Dmoz and present in unique format it will definitely be preferred by Search Engines, Webmaster and Web Surfers. Google has got its own directory for which it has got data from Dmoz but enhanced by Google technology i.e ranking of sites on each directory page by Page Rank.
Using ODP Clone Scripts just to make simple odp clone will get your site banned from search engines due to duplicate contents. Therefore it is advised not to use this virtually useless script on important sites or sites that rank well on search engines. Lot of ODP Clone Scripts makers sites were banned, because too many websites with duplicate content ( as they all have Dmoz clone) were linked to them. These scripts owner require there site URL to be linked at the footer as 'Powered by ...' Which results into link farming or inbound links from similar pages.
Therefore if you want your site or directory to be safe and run for longer times then have original and unique contents in it which will not only make it rank but also get good traffic on your site and increase its popularity.
The Article is written by Nameeta Kashyap Editor of Megri Web Directory(www.megri.com) and Team leader of Megrisoft
According to Google, Google's Blog Search is 'Google search technology focused on blogs'. It includes search engine results specific to blogs not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large. You can access it at Google Blogsearch.
What the Big Deal Is
A lot of people have probably heard about this extra version of search Google has added and are greeting it with a big yawn, particularly since it's still in Beta. So what is the big deal, anyway?
The big deal is that the top search engine in the world, which was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, seems to make a subtle statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches.
Blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.
If search engines are paying attention to blogging that closely, you should be too -- if you want better search engine results.
Current fans of blogs will be able to search the freshest results so that they can see what is being discussed right now - information that is often as fresh as the news, and draws upon sources that the media-at-large either doesn't have ready access to, or interest in.
So to those with even the most obscure interests or hobbies, a blog search powered by a top search engine gives ready access to fresh information on any subject that someone can blog about.
And if a blog doesn't yet exist on these narrow themes? You can be the one to start the discussion.
Why It Matters to Your Business
Speaking of the media, this is likely to become one of the many tools that a journalist in the know would use in order to research a story, or to find out more information about a company, directly from the people who use its products or services.
Technorati, is at present, arguably a better tool, but it's just not as well known as the Google brand. If you're a power searcher, you already know what Technorati is. But the key thing to understand is that most consumers - even B2B consumers - aren't as deeply involved in the internet.
But even those folks know what Google is.
There's an even more obvious advantage to this specialized search.
Google Blog search has the unprecedented potential to bring the mainstream surfer into blogging, even more than Yahoo's RSS Headlines pioneered the start of making RSS mainstream about a year ago. Why?
While many of your clients will fall instantly in love with RSS, it's more fair to them to present its possibilities in a format that's easier for them to digest. It's not as hard to explain a blog - and if you can't you can simply tell them it's a more frequently updated part of your existing site.
When Google's Blog Search is brought more to the front in coming months, if your site gets into position to be visible when more of the internet population becomes blog-happy, then the traffic potential for your site may prove to be enormous.
The proper use of one RSS feed in one of my content management systems doubled my traffic, with most of the new users coming from Yahoo, this time last year. Another feed increased my daily traffic another 75%, and brought me additional return traffic as well.
At the time the margin between Yahoo and Google was wider than it is today -- so the potential increase from being in Google boggles the mind.
How to Get Listed
According to the Blog Search Help Page:
'If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.'
This means that if you're already blogging - and responsibly pinging, you're probably already listed.
If you haven't been blogging, you're in luck. This special brand of Google search is still in Beta, so if you get moving now, you still have enough time to start getting into position. And since the search currently seems to be focused on freshness and relevance, if you keep up the blogging once you start, and you keep your theme narrow, you could still dominate your niche.
Do It Today
The mantra for blogging before was that, proper blogging is a sure fire way to increase traffic, as well as build stronger ties to your end users or clients, not to mention that it is the simplest of the many implementations of RSS.
Now, with all three major search engines paying more attention to both RSS and Blogging, you can get spidered more frequently, get more of your pages indexed more deeply, and be included in more searches.
You have absolutely no time to waste - if you're not blogging already, you need to get started quickly. Many webmasters are hesitating because they haven't been able to find a blog system that fits well with their site, or find the most popular tools too sophisticated for their needs.
There are literally dozens of free resources to help you decide between the standard systems that were originally built for the personal blogger, and the more robust solutions that are aimed at the medium-sized or corporate company - but that's another article.
Whatever you chose, the important thing is to get started blogging today. You'll be missing out on targeted traffic from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web.
Tinu Abayomi-Paul is the co-owner of Leveraged Promotion, which provides many solutions for companies who prefer to out-source their online promotion needs. At http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com you can find out more about how RSS, Blogs and Podcasting can increase your online visibility.
