Ricky’s Online Business Blog

I’m trying to make a quick note why you should consider blogging for your business.

Search engine friendliness - A normal web site is “static”, meaning that it doesn’t change much over time. But a blog updated regularly can provide fresh content to the search engines. Google can crawl your web site and so update its search results more often if it has a blog.

Keywording - What keywords you want people to type in Google to find you? In blog you can stuff your blog posts with the keywords you want. A blog is ever-growing and so your keywords’ exposure grows as well.

Ease of setup - You may need a web designer to do up your web site. But with blog, there are so many free blogging software available, such as WordPress, that you don’t really need so much technical knowledge to create a blog site. DIY stands for Do It Yourself!

Ease of maintenance - With a normal web site, you may need to spend much for a web designer to update your content (maintenance is not cheap so that’s why you can see so many web sites not updated). But with a blog, you can just login any time to make changes yourself! Again, it’s free!

Low cost - You may need to spend thousands of dollars to hire a web design firm. But with blogging, web development can be literally FREE! At most, you need to pay up for your domain name, web hosting, and maybe hire someone to set up your blog. Then you are off to blogging!

So if you already have a conventional web site, I guess it’s time to add a blog to it. If you don’t have a web site yet, why not create your whole site as a blog?

Not convinced?  Find out more from OneCoach - the 3 ways how blogging can help your business.

Years ago when Google was already successful, I was in a coffee house with a friend.  We were discussing how to beat Google and build a better search engine!  We wanted to become Larry Page and Sergery Brin in Malaysia!  Ambitious, huh?

Google search result was then very much based on PageRank to calculate the “popularity” of web sites.  One main factor for the “popularity” of a web site is the number and quality of links from other web sites to it.  The more backlinks your web site has, the more “popular” it is, and so the higher ranking you will get in Google.

So how to outsmart Google?  We thought of the possibility of ranking web sites based on their traffic.  The more a web site is visited, the higher ranking it should have.  We thought of calculating “popularity” based on hits, not backlinks.

But how are we going to track the traffic?  We can’t get site owners to put a counter code on their sites.  We also can’t access their web server logs.  So finally we did nothing and dropped the idea.

But now Microsoft seems to be on similar line of thought when they proposed something called BrowseRank, which calculates popularity based on traffic and usage.  The more a web site is visited and the longer period of time it is spent on by users, the higher ranking it should have in search result.

I don’t know how they could do it.  But if they succeed to beat Google and become the number one search engine (which I think is not likely), I and my friend have only ourselves to blame for not further developing our idea.

I heard there are three kinds of people in this world - those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who don’t know what happen!  Apparently I belong to those who watch things happen!

When you give a “link love” to a web page, it means you put up a link from your web page to that web page.  It is often unsolicited, that means the other web page owner does not ask for the link.  But you want to link because it may be so interesting, funny, admirable, funky, useful, informative or worthy of your link love.

According to common understanding (or misunderstanding?), when you link out to another web page, you are giving them a “vote” on its importance.  Google will treat your link to the page as a backlink, therefore ranking that page higher in its search result pages.

Furthermore, when you link out to another page, according to the common (mis)understanding of the Google PageRank formula, you can be losing “importance” for yourself, and so your link love makes you less important, and so lower ranking in Google search result.

This is not to mention that, when you link out to another page, you can drive visitors away from your web site to those page, therefore reducing traffic on your web site.

Therefore, many site owners or bloggers are very careful in linking to others.  Reciprocal linking (both pages agree to link to each other)?  Maybe.  One way linking?  By default no!

But have we understood it correctly?  After reading directly from the source in the official Google webmaster central blog, it seems that it really does not matter whether we should be generous or stingy in our link love or not.

What really matters is that we link to only web pages whose content are relevant to ours.  This can make our site even more “important” in our subject matter.  But we need to avoid linking to web pages with irrelevant content, “spammy” pages which exist only to increase their search ranking, and “bad neighborhood” which is a collection of web sites which scheme to increase ranking of one another.

By the way, I wonder if “link love” is an appropriate term or not.  True love to someone, as I was taught, is something we give out unselfishly, even if the other person does not deserve it.  It is a mercy and grace.  It is not about what we can get in return.

So are you a generous link lover or a stingy link lover?  As for me, I’m learning to be generous one.  I will link to you if you are good and relevant, whether you ask for it or not.  And as a site owner, my job is not to beg for links, but to develop really good content so that others will “love” me more