December 2005/January 2006

Volume 46, Number 3

Writing for the Blogging World: October Chapter Meeting Review

by Deb Lockwood

In October, Dave Taylor, owner of Intuitive Systems (www.intuitive.com) in Boulder, Colorado, told us everything we would want to know about extending our influence into the wild world of blogs and online discussion groups. Not only did we discover how to do so, but Dave was very clear about why we should do so...to increase our visibility on the Internet thereby increasing profits for our companies, and so that we will be considered the influencers in our fields of expertise!

Mr. Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He manages seven different Web sites, including three blogs. One of his blogs is a question and answer Web log called "Ask Dave Taylor" (askdavetaylor.com). It contains answers he sends to e-mailed questions. (Google really likes Q&A formats.)

What is a Blog?

According to Webopedia.com, a blog (short for Web log) is "a Web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual." When they originally appeared, blogs were personal logs chronicling an author's daily experiences. Now that blogs are becoming ubiquitous on the Web, their use is expanding into business applications.

Almost all blogs include a content management system. Blog articles exist on the main index page, and can be published individually by RSS (Real Simple Syndication, an XML format).

Why Should We Care About Blogs?

More and more people are using the Internet to search for goods and services. These days, about 60% of people buy products in person at a store after doing research about the products online. Therefore, it is critical that your customers be able to find you on the Web. In order for them to find you, Internet browser search engines must first find you.

How do search engines find you? Dave relayed information specific to Google's search engine criteria. When compiling search results for a query, Google doesn't look at Web sites. Rather, it goes to specific pages within the Web site. It looks for the number of occurrences of a particular keyword within the page. (The keyword is what the online searcher types in query's search field.)

Dave suggested that we be cautious when using search engine optimization experts because they can steer us wrong. If you try to get "tricky" with your Web site to increase your search result ranking, trying to get around the rules, Google or Yahoo can block your company from their search results all together.

Blogging is free market data just sitting out there on the Web. People could be writing about your company and your competitors. And all you have to do to listen in on their thoughts is to run a query using your company name and read what people are writing about you.

Reporters use the Web for research, and they are some of the world's thought leaders. As a blog author, you can be an influencer, even influencing the thought leaders themselves. The key is that your company must be highly findable in order for them to find you.

What Do Search Engines Like?

What is it that search engines really like and that will increase your chances of appearing in the search results? They like content that changes frequently, and that is keyword rich.

The optimal frequency for change is daily. The more often your content changes, the higher your ranking in the search results.

Keyword rich means that your content pages contain multiple instances of the term your customers use in the search engine query text box. For instance, if you work for TechSmith, and you are responsible for the Web content for their SnagIt screen capture product, you should mention "screen capture" at least six times in the text on your product page. The more times the keyword is mentioned on the page, the more relevant the search results, and the closer it is to the top of the query result list.

Having Trouble Staying Current?

Dave asked us if we ever had trouble staying on top of producing fresh content. Search engines love blogs because the content changes quite often. A blog is effectively a content management system, and does all the heavy lifting of updating the index. Blogs are also very easy to update.

How does Google determine if content is current? Dave told us that the Google bot spiders the Web, looking for recently changed content. When you first post your Web site, the Google bot searches and logs the site. If after 90-days you haven't changed the site, the bot won't come back for another 90 days. After 90- days the bot returns to the site every 90-days to see if content has changed. If, however, you have content that changes within the first 90 days, the bot keeps coming back.

The author of a blog has the option to allow readers to write and submit comments. And a blog entry, whether it is one the author posts or one a reader posts, is viewed by search engines as new content! In that way, a blog helps you keep your Web site current.

How Do I Create a Blog?

Dave recommended using a blog-creation application to create your blog. He uses a down-loadable application called Moveable Type (www.sixapart.com/moveabletype/).

Server-side software is available also, such as Blogger (www.blogger.com), TypePad (www.typepad.com), and WordPress (www.wordpress.com). Wordpress.com is open source.

To see what kinds of applications are available, go to your favorite Web browser and search for "blog creation software."

These applications make authoring and maintaining a blog about as easy as typing an e-mail message. With most applications, the author has the choice to allow all comments, to edit comments, or to delete comments. In some cases, Dave has had to delete or edit comments, depending on their content. You can liken the process to the editor of the New York Times. That editor doesn't automatically publish letters to the editor as they were written. Letters go through a review process.

Once you have the software, think of an applicable topic. To see what is out there already, go to a blog search engine. (See "How Do I Find Blogs?")

How Do You Build Traffic and Gain Recognition?

The people who are writing blogs are the thought leaders of our day. That blogging community writes about other people's blogs in their articles. Early adopters to the Internet used to do the same sort of thing by including links to their favorite Web sites.

You can gain traffic to your site and recognition as an expert by going to other sites and posting interesting, considered, and well-written responses to a blog article.

Dave shared one story of how an attorney in upstate New York responded to one of Dave's postings with a very well considered reply. Not too long afterward a reporter for a national newspaper was searching online for exactly the type of information that the attorney included in his reply. The reporter contacted the attorney, and—after a brief discussion—the attorney found himself quoted as a recognized expert in the reporter's story that appeared in a well-known national newspaper.

How Do I Find Blogs?

You can find blogs by using a blog search engine like www.technorati.com. On this particular site, you can search blogs by keyword, Website URL, or tag.

Google has a blog search engine that is currently in beta (www.blogsearch.google.com). This search engine is more discriminating in that it indexes only good sites. These results will include a smaller, higher quality group of blogs.

Tips

Google's search engine really likes question and answer formats.

When you build your Web site, remember that search engines like Google search individual Web pages. When the searcher clicks the link in Google's search results, the appropriate Web page appears. This page is most commonly not the site's home page. Therefore, you need to include navigation tools (e.g., back, next, home) on every page in your site so people can get to your home page from any subpage.

Dave recommended that we read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It is about influencing thought in a group. (See the book review of this book, which is also in this issue of Technicalities.)

You might want to consider retaining copyright of blog comments because you may one day want to create a book or write articles on these topics. (You can retain copyright by including a standard copyright statement on the blog's posting form. See an attorney to work out the appropriate language.)

Blogs may eventually supplant some Web sites. Plan now for future eventualities by creating one common look for your blog and your Web site.

So, how does Dave make money from his online work? He runs Google ads on his pages. After you build up an audience, these ads can be quite profitable.

Most blog creation software allows for RSS (RDF [Resource Description Framework] Site Summary) feeds. Readers can then subscriber to the RSS feed, and the application will automatically send the reader an e-mail of the content that is new.

Dave subscriber to Newsgator (www.newsgator.com), which is a currently free RSS aggregator service. Through it, he picks every news wire and writer he wants to read, and Newsgator sends him an e-mail message once a day with the compiled content. In this way, RSS aggregators are acting as today's news clipping services.