If RSS is the Yahoo backdoor, is a Blog Google’?
Though the answer is in a book I wrote this July, the question is still asked of me repeatedly. Why does it work for some sites and not others? And how come some blogs get indexed in a day and then are dropped, and others stay in Google indefinitely?
Well, let’s take one question at a time. The answer to whether you can blog your way into Google search results is yes, sometimes in six weeks, often in 24 hours. Yes, you read right, in less than 24 hours. Under certain conditions, the search engines actually want you to succeed at this.
I’m aware that these statements may cause some controversy, but that won’t make them any less factual. Since September, Google has been set up to show you proof of this, which we’ll go over in part two. My new blog has been spidered daily since the day it was created.
Not only is this possible with your blog, the way that blogs are set up make them one of the most conducive web site mediums to attract more traffic from multiple sources quickly. The trick to getting this to work for you, is in understanding which conditions have to be met first.
And we’ll come back to that shortly. First let’s talk about what’;s typically wrong with the process most people take to get their sites listed.
Most people submit their sites to Google and wait six to eight weeks to see if they were included. Other people know that the fastest way to be spidered is to leave your link at a site that is already getting spidered.
But even among those people, when they don’t see their site in Google exactly the way they’d like, they give up, and say it didn’t work.
So what went wrong?
The place that the majority of people go wrong is in trying to trick the Googlebot into thinking their site matches its standards for inclusion for their desired high traffic keyword, instead of aligning themselves with the purpose that the search engine fills.
You may think that if you study all the search engine tricks, you’ll have the traffic from the search engines and it will then follow that yours will be the site people come to for the keyword they want, which in turn, will get 1% of those people to buy what’s at your site.
If you think that, I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong – sometimes that works. I’m just saying that there are other easier, faster, less expensive ways. Some of them only have subtle differences from the way you know.
The truth is, even if we could somehow reverse engineer the secret Google algorithm, it periodically changes. So mastering that system would be temporary, even if you could do it.
Did you know that you don’t even need the traffic for your most desired keyword to be successful? You just need some targeted traffic that converts well. Some of the most financially successful sites generate amazing profits in the tens or hundreds of thousands with a few hundred or thousand visitors every month.
The method I most suggest to the kind of search engine results that can power those kinds of sales, is aligning your site with the purpose the search engine wants to fill. It is faster, more effective and involves far less effort.
And yes, you should still make sure your blog meets all the basic search engine optimization guidelines when you set it up. However, the very nature of a blog makes it easier to meet more of these requirements with less continual struggle.
Let’s look at the facts, and see how blogs align themselves more closely with one of Google’s purposes as a search engine.
We know that
1- if you get your site’s link in the path of the search engine spider or robot of your choice, in this case Googlebot, that crawls around the web looking for information if may follow it. (Even when you submit your site and wait, what you’re waiting for it so get your site spidered.)
2- the way to get it to follow the link is to make sure it can “see” your link
3- if your content fills a need that the search engine’s database of links has, it will include it, and,
4- if your link fills a deficit better than any other site, in accordance with Google’s secret formula or algorithm, it will rank your page well.
So now, the only missing component necessary to our success is now finding out how to be the best site Google finds for a category that has a deficit.
One of the strengths of Google, as perceived by people who like it, is the vast amount of fresh content it contains that is relevant to almost any topic, or keyword, typed into it, no matter how narrow or broad.
It follows then, that one purpose of this database of links is to provide fresh, relevant content on topics its users desire. The freshest, most relevant, most topical information found on the web today are in blogs, as well as their corresponding RSS or Atom feeds.
A blog’s very function is to contain constantly updated focused content, on one topic or field.
When blogs first started, the topic was often a person’s life. As blogs move into the realm of business, at their best, they are updated records of a certain kind of information relevant to an industry, a company or a topic, that is aligned with the interests of their visitors.
So you need to know the following things in order to get your blog included on Google’s search engine results pages.
• Where to leave your link so that it will get spidered
• How to make sure Googlebot sees the link
• How to set up your blog so that content fills a deficit
• What is the best way to make sure your blog fills the search engine’s desire better than other sites.
There’s a specific formula of success for this, one of many that will work not just one time, but repeatedly.
We’ve run out of space for the moment, but (the author requires email subscription) part two picks up with the specifics of how your blog needs to be set up, and gives tips on one of the most important parts of your blog – its content feed.
