SEO, blogs, Google, and the Beatles

May 12th, 2008

The best news of all

Once you start building your blog, you’ll start rising in the search results.

Google has changed the way most of us use the Internet. Even if I know the web address I am looking for, I often use Google to search for the site so I don’t have to type the whole thing in.

Recently, the minds at Google realized that when you search for things, you want what’s real, current, and reliable. So, they have given priority to dated blog content in sorting out the search results they show you. That means, if your blog post title includes the key words of someone’s search, your post may end up very near the top of the search results.

So, each blog post becomes like a very specific bread crumb for your potential clients, customers, or donors to find. With a blog post, they see what they’ve searched for, and all your key information surrounds what they are reading. I recently wrote a post about understanding financial statements and drew a parallel to the Beatles song Let It Be. Within minutes of publishing that post, I searched on financial statements Beatles, and was amazed to find my blog entry #1 in the Google results. See where it is now.

The key is, clearly, writing very specific articles that include words your audience might be interested in seeing. Your current staff and volunteers are the perfect ones to help create this content as they ARE your audience. They share interests and use the same words.

Of course, your staff are probably not professional writers or photographers. I suggest forming an editorial committee that drafts and periodically enforces (by weekly review) standards for your organization. This will allow the rules to be generated by the people in charge and also by the creators of content, who may have a more nuanced sense of what will work and won’t.

If you really want to get wild, ask your customers or your wider community to create content for you!

One Response to “SEO, blogs, Google, and the Beatles”

  1. The Sloan blog about blogs :: Web site not showing up (or low ranking) on Google or other search engines? Says:
    May 12th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    [...] What is SEO What is SEnotO Other benefits of blogs [...]

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