Friday, June 08, 2007

Blogs and search engines

During yesterday’s recording of Amtower Off-Center (to be broadcasted today at 2 PM), I forgot to mention one of the most important reasons for corporate blogging, search engine visibility. Every company should do a search on themselves and the names of their management. What do you see? At minimum,when you do a search on your company’s name, your company should come up in the first ten results.

Blogs can be very useful in that respect. Even a low traffic blog can improve your company’s search engine visibility. Particularly if you use social tagging (del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, etc.) to boost the effect of a favorable blog post.

This is difficult to explain to clients. A favorable blog post on a low ranking blog with some social tagging seems a very poor substitute for having your picture on the cover of BusinessWeek. But to the unblinking eye of Google, that blog post will be working for you for months and years to come. Moreover, blogs are increasingly driving editorial judgment, so blog buzz often works its way up the media food chain. You can receive a mention on a blog, six months later a reporter could be researching an industry trends story and find that blog post, leading to a mention in a feature article. The effect of good blog post will continue for months, even years, after it is written.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post, Alice! This is one of the most compelling reasons in my opinion for why companies should be blogging. You lay out the case in an easy way to understand - I will be referencing this post next week at www.blogsites.biz. I look forward to reading more of what you have to share!

Alice said...

Thank you, glad you liked it.