Business Blogging - An Essential Member Of Your E-business Toolkit
You can hardly move on the Internet these days without tripping over someone’s blog. But what is a blog for and how does it fit into your business? Why is blogging so important for a business?
The emergence of blogging as a business tool is down to Google. Had they not appeared on the search scene and revolutionised the Internet we would not be seeing blogs enter the e-business toolkit. If you can conceive of an Internet in pre-Google days, search engines were floundering; they were slow and often returning irrelevant results. There was a general opinion that search was dead – it wasn’t very effective and no one was making any money from it. The Google-boys changed all that with their mission to organise the world’s information and make it easily accessible1.
Google has a very purest attitude towards their business and the World Wide Web, they have an ethos guided by the statement “Don’t be Evil2”, and they rejected flashy graphics and gizmos in favour of speed and relevancy. They even resisted becoming a commercial organisation for fear of tainting the integrity of their search engine. This lead to the development of AdWords – a new concept in Internet marketing that maintained their goals of speed and relevancy while providing a commercial basis for the company. These purest instincts lead them back to Sir Tim Burners-Lee’s 3 (the Englishman who invented the World Wide Web) original vision. Coming from a background of high-level research he had imagined the World Wide Web as a collaborative tool where a researcher could easily publish his work, and have other’s comment and collaborate on the page for all to see. References to another work would easily access the document itself – and the hyperlink was born!
What does this all have to do with blogging for business? Blogging is a manifestation of Sir Tim’s original idea. It is very simple indeed now to create an entire website from a blogging engine, and allow others to add comment and contributions. We can also see this effect with Wikis, the most famous being Wikipedia4. They are openly accessible collaborative tools. It is no surprise that Wikipedia features so heavily in Google’s results, though this may have been overdone. Wikis are a great tool but don’t have the same appeal to the average business website, as it’s unlikely that a business would be happy for just anyone to edit their product descriptions.
In addition to blogging simply fitting in with the original concept of the World Wide Web, there are some more down to earth practical reasons that Google like them. The Google-bot is Google’s spider – a program that wanders the World Wide Web indexing all the sites it finds. As you can imagine, the Google-bot is busy. If it re-indexes a website and finds that the content has not changed since the last time it visited, it will leave it a little longer before the next visit. If, however, it finds that the content has changed, it will visit a little sooner. Over time this process will mean that sites that are unchanging static sites will be visited less and less, and the dynamic changing site will be visited more and more. It is not difficult to draw the conclusion that a changing site will be more relevant than a long-term static site. It will not be the only factor to decide relevancy, but it will have a bearing on the judgement Google will make.
So, let us review: blogging is a manifestation of the original concept of the World Wide Web; constantly changing content is likely to be more relevant than static content; Google have a purest attitude to how the World Wide Web should be organised, and are obsessed with relevancy; and Google have the last say in who appears at the top of their search results; the top result is going to get the most click-throughs and, presumably, the most business and profit.
Blogging is an essential member of your e-business toolkit!
Copyright 2007, Jason Rudland Internet Business Consultants
http://www.jasonrudland.co.uk/
Tags: Blogging, Business Consultants, E-business, Jason Rudland, SEM, SEO, website
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