Image credit: Pandemia
Google Universal Search indexes far more than just web pages – it also indexes news, images, videos and blogs.
How do you get onto page one?
According to Matt Cutts of Google to get good search rankings you need
- The keywords you want to rank for in your title tag
- Keywords well placed on the page
- Excellent content about the subject you want to rank for on the page
- Fresh content posted in a blog
- Links from other sites that recommend your site as an authority on that subject
Why does Google pay attention to blogs? They are mainly text, they get updated with new content on a regular basis and they have an RSS Feed. That’s the secret weapon.
“Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites,” says Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing in his blog.
Google does see some websites as blogs and this has raised questions in the WebmasterWorld Forums. RSS feeds seem to be the common denominator. A blog after all, is just a web page with a feed.
Using feeds on your web content can increase your visibility and your traffic. For PR purposes, syndicating news content in feeds is a must.
“Even if it’s something as simple as putting press releases in an RSS feed, marketers will benefit from distributing information via RSS — and receive valuable feedback from key constituents on what types of content they would like to have.” Forrester Research.
If you are not familiar with RSS, find out what feeds are and what they do
“If you’re getting into blog search results (particularly in Universal results), you’re opening up your site for additional traffic,” says Chris Crum on WebProNews.
So if Google thinks your news page is a blog you get more visibility and traffic? That can’t be bad.
A rose by any other name…
