Why Google Blog Search Matters to Your Business

Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

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
http://www.blogsearch.google.com/

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.