If RSS is the Yahoo backdoor, is a Blog Google’s?
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 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.
