Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman

Chapter 11. Blogging Your Way to Credibility

When most people head out on the Information Super-highway, their point of departure is a search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. They know what they're looking for, and these search engines provide just the tools they need to find it. When someone's searching for what you are selling, you want a link to your site to pop up at or near the top of the search results. That's what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about.

You can read thousands of articles on SEO, recommending everything from packing your site with key words to making key words bold, and strategically adding links to your site from other web sites. Perhaps the best way to promote yourself on the Web, however, is through blogging.

Short for Web log, a blog is an online publication of one's personal thoughts, experiences, and insights presented in reverse chronological order that allows visitors to respond to each post with their own comments.

Search engines such as Google love blogs. In fact, blogging enthusiasts often refer to blogs as Google juice, because a blog entry attracts much more attention (and a much higher ranking) than if the same content were included on a standard Web page. In addition, if several people post comments in response to your blog entry, you can expect its Google page rank to soar without any additional effort on your part.

Why? Because blogs do a much better job than standard web sites at feeding search engines what they're hungry for: ...