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Web 2.0 has had many success stories as the integration between web content and user interaction becomes evermore seamless. One of the most prominent and fast-growing of these new web technologies however, is blogging - a means whereby users can post articles and opinions on a topic of their choosing on their own personal web space. This results in an online community where all users of the site can contribute to the discussion by posting comments, and more significantly, hyperlinks. As a Search Engine Optimization strategy, this can be an effective means of communicating not only the existence, but the importance of your website in the industry, especially if comments and blog posts speak favorably of your site. The main factor is that blogs can reach a lot of potential users if they're implemented and promoted correctly.

Say for example, there's a situation whereby every time you had an idea to share, 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it in your blog. Most of those 5,000 people may also write blogs in your field or related fields. Some of those bloggers may often mention your site on their blogs, and they themselves could have thousands of subscribers. Within a short space of time your blog could have the attention of hundreds or even thousands of web users and customers. Search engines follow people's posting activity, so if many users link to your blog, it will also boost the search engine ranking for other parts of your site.

It is important however that your blog postings avoid what is dubbed 'commodity status', which are short posts about somebody else's work, and simply posting for the sake of generating optimized keywords. Posts must maintain quality, originality, depth and have its content driven by the user's expertise in order to acquire popularity amongst web communities. I have studied in-depth, the work of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, and I have found an interesting article of his; Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, which encapsulates this matter perfectly. He asserts that leadership (or prevalence of the poster's expertise) in blog postings, blog-post variability and regularity are of high priority in gaining trust and recognition. What Nielsen wants to do is to encourage you to personalize your posts, by giving your own opinions and judgments on your subjects to provoke interest and even raise debate - that way you'll generate more readers.

He also points out however, that if provoking content isn't the main purpose of your site, and you simply want to communicate simple answers to your user's questions then "you should comply with the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks." These guidelines all fall nicely into the standard Search Engine Optimization requirements. It seem that it is therefore essential that blog postings for SEO manage to achieve a good balance where expertise and content usability can work together to bring the right users to your site.

One of the principal objectives of Web 2.0 and web logging is to turn the Internet into more of a community that just an information resource, and by using the blogging system in the most effective way for your website, you can take major advantage of this process. This doesn't just mean writing articles on your chosen topic and leaving it there, but it means interacting with the wider web community. Quoting and linking to other popular bloggers on your blog, leaving useful comments on other related blogs, writing articles for other blogs and actively soliciting & replying to comments can really push users towards your blog. It is about generating activity in your posts and interactions with other bloggers. Now with RSS feeds also enhancing the likeliness of your articles being noticed and linked to, it will only improve your website's probability of being picked up by Search Engines, making blog posting a valuable resource for optimization.

Reference:

Wall, A M (2007). Search Engine Optimization Book. California: Aaron Matthew Wall. 87-91.

Jakob Nielsen (2007) Write Articles, Not Blog Postings [online] available from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html [15 January. 2007]

By Adam Moss, Web Developer
Creare Communications
Creare Design

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