How Search Engines View Your Blog
Hey folks, I know you may be interested in getting your blog started or learning more about blogging. We are here not so much to teach you how to blog but more so how to better get your blog read by other people. Your blog should represent your views. It is written by a human, you, and should read like humans talk. Rules of grammar and punctuation are for English class. How many people do you know that don't use a double negative or have a preposition at the end of their sentences? Who cares? As long as it reads well and conveys your exact meaning, then you have done your job. There are many sites that will help you improve your writing if you so desire. Let's look at how search engines view your blog.
One of the biggest misconceptions about search engines is thinking they rank websites. They don't rank websites. They rank web pages. We may use those two terms interchangeably but do know there is a difference. Once you enter a keyword in the search engine, it will list the web pages where that word or phrase is found. Look at the search engines like an index in the back of a book. The index lists important words in the book and tells you what page to find those words. The search engines indexes all the words on websites and tells you what web page those words are once you do a search for a specific word or phrase.
This is why your blogs content is important. Your blog is words. Usually, you are speaking about a specific topic. You want to gear your blog entries around a specific keyword or set of keywords. Part of this strategy is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you have been doing your research, you will be familiar with this term. Basically it puts your web pages in a position to be better seen by the search engine robots or spiders. Those are terms used to describe the methods in which search engines gather new information for search results.
When you are optimizing your page, realize that what you and other viewers see is totally different than what the search engines see. Most web designers are totally unaware on how search engines work and design sites with flash video and fancy graphics. The web pages they create are virtually invisible to the robots and spiders. The search engines need words. They are constantly looking for new, relevant content for their search engine results. This is why when you type in say the Chicago Bears, what pops up first is information about the Bears today, not the 1985 Superbowl winning team (Da Bears).
Search engines, like Google, have a specific algorithm (that constantly changes by the way) that determines what web page is most relevant to a specific set of keywords. The beauty of blogs is that you war constantly writing new stuff so you constantly have new information for the search engines. You just have to make your site more visible to the search engines. How do you do that? Great question. Will go into that one in another section. Stay tuned.