When I created the new category for ‘Tech Trends’ awhile back, one of my goals was to discuss search engine optimization (SEO) as it relates to blogs and their content. I haven’t written much about this but I have been doing quite a bit of research on it. I maintain several websites, both of my own and my clients, and so knowing, or should I say learning, what is happening in the SEO world is important to me, albeit a constantly moving target. Blogs have become the latest and greatest trend in the past year or so, their popularity really picking up momentum through the 2004 elections and into this year. Many people just blog for fun as a way to keep a journal, but for the business world, blogging is serious business and can translate into huge business exposure, revenue and growth. How can a blog make this much of a difference, you ask?

Well search engines and directories love content. They love fresh content that changes a lot and is updated frequently. Blogs fit into this equation very well because not only is the content on blogs updated often, it is usually very relevent information about news and events happing right now. This information is indexed very quickly by search engines and so it stands to reason, that if your blog is fresh and relevant and updated frequently, you will appear higher in search results. And of course every business strives to be at the top of the search engines. So translated very simply, businesses who blog “can” become very popular. Lots of businesses dismiss blogging as a just a bunch of writers running around with their iPods keeping sappy journals and diaries. Business who think this way are missing a huge potential market for their products and services. Why do I care about this? Because I do web design and own my own business and have clients who rely on me to provide them with this sort of insight. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Anyway, the moral of today’s story is this. Last week I launched a new blog called . I love politics and I love blogs so I thought it would be a great match to do a bit of research and development to further my blog and SEO education. One of the tricks I learned in the last year to get into the Yahoo! search engine index quickly was to add an RSS feed to My Yahoo! page. If you’re not familiar with My Yahoo, it’s basically a custom home page that you can create for free that aggregates all of your favorite news and web information into one summary page. Well My Yahoo pages also support RSS feeds for new content. So, by adding a new RSS feed to the My Yahoo page, the associated website is automatically added in to the Yahoo! index. It works. I added my own site feed from just a few short days ago and today I am happy to report that the search phrase ‘common sense democracy’ now holds the third, fourth and fifth top positions in Yahoo!. This is significant for me for a number of reasons. It shows how quickly a site can get into the search engine database. And although nobody will probably ever search on the phrase ‘common sense democracy’ it shows that those individual terms are being indexed as relevant to my site. It’s a small but symbolic victory that I think effectively illustrates to people why blogging is important for getting seen on the internet.

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