As a new blogger, I’ve been doing a lot of research about the value of blogging and blog seo.
Rich Brooks of flyte (the wonderful company that built my new website and blog) told me that the quality of leads that are coming in thru blogs can be even better than the leads coming in thru standard websites, saying that "although Google gives me over 50% of my Web site traffic (compared to my blog giving me 11%,) my blog gives me a conversion rate (people who fill out my contact form) that’s about 5 – 6 times better!"
So I was interested to read a recent post by Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea, where he turned the Google Blogsearch patent application into a primer for how to optimize your blog for search engine ranking. Bill names different factors that impact rankings. Many of the points make sense if you know anything about seo, but it’s great to hear it from the horses mouth!
Positive factors include blog popularity, inclusion in blogrolls and tagging. Negative factors include frequency of posts, size (both relating to spamming or automation of blog posts) and the presence of ads. If you blog or are thinking of starting one and want it to rank well, here’s one article you shouldn’t miss:
"Google’s blog search shows results in responses to searchers queries based upon a combination of relevance scores and quality scores.
The relevance scores are based upon the search query terms entered into the search box by a searcher, and use traditional styled information retrieval scores for documents. These scores could be created by looking at…" Read Bill’s entire post here.
-Susan Martin, NYC Marketing Coach and newbie blogger.
