Make Blog Spiders Your Friends

As you step into the blogosphere and try to start using your business blog for maximum marketing impact, you may feel like Dorothy trying to reach the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. The only difference is you don't have a yellow brick road to follow. Or do you?

Thousands of business owners are starting blogs every day. Many of them are doing it to get better search engine rankings that bring more traffic to their site.

As they reach for that goal, however, far too many will fall prey to the belief that having frequent postings packed with good keywords will bring them the results they want. They believe in the misconception that quality content doesn't matter to get top-level rankings.

But that's not the way to Oz, and it's certainly not the way to marketing effectively with your business blog. Producing content that way will never get you the people you need as readers. And without people you can turn into raving fans, you'll never get the viral impact and valuable links you need.

Fortunately, the yellow brick road to business blogging success--filled with people, crawlers and spiders--isn't hard to find. And it's surprisingly easy to follow once you're on it. If you plan your business blog properly, gaining popularity with both people and search engine spiders will come easily.

Why? Well-focused blogs are naturally attractive to both people and search-engine spiders alike. The way a blog is structured and maintained gives these two key players exactly what they want most.

Why People Are Attracted to Blogs
1. Blogs are focused on a niche. Most good blogs are highly topical and are run by someone passionate about that niche. Because of that passion, these bloggers act as a filter for the vast amount of information we're bombarded with daily. That filtering, analysis--and yes, even opinionated commenting--is valuable to people who share an interest in that same area. After all, who has the time to research everything when you can rely on a few trusted experts to do the filtering for you and get the information you need fast?

2. Blogs allow active participation. The interaction capability built into blogging software--through commenting, trackbacks and social bookmarking--makes it easy for the reader to engage in the conversation. This interaction opens a dialogue, which makes your readers feel part of the process. They're no longer just passive consumers of information, they're active participants who have a say.

3. Blogs provide connections to other likeminded people. People want to be connected with likeminded individuals, so when a woman with similar interests finds your blog and likes what you have to say, she finds herself immediately connected with you--and likes you. As you deliver more content, that connection deepens and expands into credibility and trust. You win. She wins. And your business blog is the medium that makes it all happen.

Why Search Engine Spiders Are Addicted to Blogs
Unlike normal websites, your business blog doesn't need tricks, tactics and constant revisions to get good search engine rankings. You could say that business blogs were born for search engine optimization. The very construction and functioning of a blog is naturally attractive--and addictive--to search engine spiders. The reasons why your business blog can be prime food for search engine spiders are remarkably similar to the top three reasons that people like blogs.

1. Spiders love topical relevance. The purpose of the search engine is to find content highly relevant to the keywords entered. When your business blog is tightly focused on a specific niche, your relevance is likely to be naturally high with very little effort on your part because when you know what your keywords are and you produce content that stays focused on your niche, peppering your posts with your keywords becomes almost an unconscious act.

2. Spiders love frequent activity. Search engines are designed to not only deliver relevant content, but also the newest, freshest information available. Well-planned business blogs, by their very nature, have both the relevance and highly active posting frequency that search engine spiders want. So those crawlers and spiders will return to your site more and more as your frequency increases. You're essentially training the spiders to visit you more often. As the spiders visit again and again and you entice them with more and more relevant content, your search-engine rankings will climb.

3. Spiders love links and connections. Just as people like to be connected, so do search engine spiders, only in a different way. Most search-engine algorithms love links, especially Google. The more relevant links you have in your blog, the more value search engines give you as a connection point to more relevant content that their users are looking for. Blogs are built to connect to each other. Since bloggers are often referencing each other, either through trackbacks or direct links, inbound links can be generated very quickly. Better yet, those inbound links increase your blog's value because they're often from sites that have a natural relevance to your site's topical content.

The true basis for linking power, though, comes from the fact that your content is valuable enough to have people want to link to your posts. Without good quality content that people want to link to or reference, you can make keyword-dense posts as frequently as you want, but you'll always get sub-par search engine results.

Although the frequency of posting undeniably helps, it's not the Ferrari that'll zip you down the yellow brick road to marketing success. Overall, quality of content trumps frequency in most niche areas. Assuming, of course, that posts are made consistently, on topic and at a frequency relative to their length, both people and spiders will devour your content.

Much like the scarecrow, tin man and lion who were told by the Wizard of Oz that they always had what they sought, you'll find that most of what you're looking for in online marketing can already be found in your business and life. You need to use your brain to properly plan and organize your business blog with a specific target niche. You need to have your heart in your business blog to be passionate about what you're blogging about. And you need to be courageous enough to step out there and simply start doing it.