Problogger.net, a great site for bloggers, is hosting a contest this month to find out what goals people have for blogging. If you’ve ever blogged before, you know that after the first couple of weeks the fun wears off and if you don’t have concrete goals set, then your blog can quickly dry up and go to waste.
My goal for blogging is to create traffic. I created this website to promote the great events in San Diego that are happening here on a daily basis. This is helpful for locals who live here as well as the tourists from around the world who visit every year. Even though I’m going to create the best website I’m technically capable of, I know that I have years before Google or Yahoo will ever send me a sizeable amount of traffic. So I have to find other ways to promote the site.
In the past I did this for my website about Crystal Reports software by participating in multiple web forums and begging people for links. I spent many, many hours of hard work and exercising a lot of patience. After two years I was rewarded with being placed on the top of the first search page by Google and MSN. Overnight, my website exploded in traffic. I can’t believe how much traffic I get now (thank you Google!!!).
Beating Google
I blog to beat Google at their own game. I don’t want to wait another two years in the hopes that Google “might” decide to give me a decent search ranking for what I hope people think is going evolve into an awesome travel site. So why do I think that blogging is the key to beating Google at their own game? First you have to consider why Google isn’t working anymore.
Google has grown from a small dynamic search engine to the leading search engine on the internet. With size comes influence. And with influence comes greed. I’m not talking about the greed of Google execs, I’m talking about the greed of people who want to use Google for their own good (like me!) and send traffic to their site. Some people have legitimate sites (me again!) and others have spam filled sites with the only purpose of generating money. These sites have enormous resources and money to get to the top of the search results and send legitimate traffic to non-legitimate sites. For Google to stay the best search engine, they have a constant battle to keep the spammers away. I think they do a great job of this, but the price is that the site is no longer dynamic like it was in the beginning.
Google implements algorithms more complex than I could ever comprehend in hopes of figuring out which websites deserve to be at the top of the search rankings. But these algorithms are so complex that it’s almost impossible to get promoted to the top unless you hire a professional team to optimize your site just for the search engines. Makes it tough for a Regular Joe with a great site to ever be discovered without spending thousands on SEO consultants and link exchange programs. The end result is that the sites at the top will stay at the top for many months and every time you do a search for a particular term, you see the same results. Why go back to Google when you already know what you are going to get?
Blogs are dynamic search engines
Blogs beat Google at their own game because they are both dynamic and organic at the same time. That’s a great combination. When you go to a website that indexes the blogs, every day your search returns different results. Static search results are a thing of the past.
However, this can be good and bad. Some results are great and some are garbage. But with blogs, the organic aspect also promotes the best sites with the most readers. The blogging community generously links to their favorite blogs so that the community builds. This helps implement a web-based quality control system that isn’t influenced by money or SEO consultants. The cream rises to top naturally.
Not only do I blog here, but I also blog with Day In San Diego on WordPress.com to get cross-traffic. Even though my traffic is very small (very, very, small), it is ten times more vistors than Google sends me (zero). With blogging, I don’t have to wait two years for search engines to list me in their search results. I know that Feedster and Blogpulse will send me new traffic with every post. In fact, my friend recently emailed me to say that the first post on his new internet consulting blog got a comment the same day he posted it. He was shocked to see the blogging community so quick to find him and even give him a comment. This changes everything for the web.
Blogging puts the small guy on equal footing with the biggest sites. Because it’s not about how much money you have for marketing or site optimization - it’s about having good ideas and using your personality to connect with your readers and give them value.
