What Is It
According to Google, Google’s Blog Search is “Google search technology focused on blogs”. It includes search engine results specific to blog not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large. If you are a responsible pinger, chances are that your blog is showing up in searches already.
What the Big Deal Is
A lot of people have probably heard about this beta version of search Google has added and are greeting it with a big yawn. So what is the big deal, anyway?
The big deal is that the top search engine in the world, which was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, has made a statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches. That statement is that blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.
Current fans of blogs will be able to search the freshest results so that they can see what is being discussed right now – information that is often as fresh as the news, and draws upon sources that the media-at-large just doesn’t have ready access to, or interest in.
Why It Matters to Your Business
Speaking of the media, this is likely to become one of the many tools that a journalist in the know would use in order to research a story, or to find out more information about a company, directly from the people who use its products or services.
There’s an even more obvious advantage this specialized search.
Google Blog search has the unprecedented potential to bring the mainstream surfer into blogging, even more than Yahoo’s RSS Headlines did about a year ago. When Google’s Blog Search is brought more to the front in coming months, if your site gets into position to be visible when more of the internet population becomes blog-happy, then the traffic potential for your site may prove to be enormous.
The proper use of one RSS feed in one of my content management systems doubled my traffic, with most of the new users coming from Yahoo, this time last year. Another feed increased my daily traffic another 75%, and brought me additional return traffic as well.
At the time the margin between Yahoo and Google was not that slim, so the potential increase from being in Google boggles the mind.
How to Get Listed
According to the Blog Search Help Page:
If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.
This means that if you’re already blogging – and responsibly pinging, you’re probably already listed.
If you haven’t been blogging, you’re in luck. This special brand of Google search is still in Beta, so if you get moving now, you still have enough time to start getting into position. And since the search currently seems to be focused on freshness and relevance, if you keep up the blogging once you start, if you keep your theme narrow, you could still dominate your niche.
Do It Today
The mantra for blogging before was that, as the simplest of the many implementations of RSS, proper blogging is a sure fire way to increase traffic, as well as build stronger ties to your end users or clients.
Now, with all three major search engines paying more attention to both RSS and Blogging, you can get spidered more frequently, get more of your pages indexed more deeply, and be included in more searches.
You have absolutely no time to waste – if you’re not blogging already, you need to get started quickly. Many webmasters are hesitating because they haven’t been able to find a blog system that fits well with their site, or find the most popular tools too sophisticated for their needs.
If you’re looking for a simple blog, you can publish with Blogger, and customize the template. Via FTP the pages will publish to your site. However, Blogger only offers one RSS feed, in Atom.
Another alternative would be to try Wordpress. It offers RSS in several formats, as well as Atom. However, you’ll have to install the software yourself, and customize the template. But this is still a good solution for a home based or small business.
Medium sized to enterprise-level corporations should look at Movable Type or Blogsite. You can see an example of Movable Type at Business Week Online’s Blog. If you want more control over commenting and trackback, their moderated option is better for blocking spam.
You can see an example of a Blogsite in the blog/news section at Leveraged Promotion. Featuring a feed for each weblog and radar channel (in their case ten) in every imaginable useful format (six at this writing), this is likely the best solution for a company that wants a template customized to fit their site. Installation is included.
Whatever you chose, the important thing is to get blogging today. You’ll be missing out on targeted traffic from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web.
Tags: free traffic :: website promotion :: SEO :: Google::Google blog search
Resources :Google Blog Search Help :: Google’s New Blog Search.
