Online Internet Marketing - Blogs Affect on the Masses
by Sydney Nelson
There's an old saying that says the only thing you can count on is change. Everything changes and nothing stays the same forever. That's certainly true for the Internet, particularly in the methods used by the major search engines like Google to rank Websites in their search listing. Before the search engines upgraded their search algorithm, Webmasters would use techniques such as stuffing pages with hundreds of keywords in order to increase the keyword density of the page. Often the color of the keywords would be the same color of the page's background so you wouldn't see all the meaningless words, but the search engine spiders would pick them up and give the page a higher standing in the search results page.
The search engines eventually caught up with all of those types of unscrupulous methods and will actually penalize or blacklist domains that practice those methods. The entire Internet is experiencing a paradigm shift as technology continues its evolution. One of the major changes is the way the search engines look at information, and consumer generated media, like blogs; which are increasingly a major consideration in search engine's algorithms.
It's not necessarily the search engines consider people's opinions to be more valid than news or information providers. The fact is the major bolgs are continually being updated with new information. Some of the major blogs have thousands of updates on a daily basis. Websites with continual updates are a prime consideration with the search engines because they consider them to be more valid than sites that are stagnant and rarely update their information.
As a result, over 40% of search results contain consumer generated media, or blogs; according to Bob Cefail of In Touch Media, Inc. The search engines are not going to "consider the source", if you will. They simply consider the busiest sites to be the best sites. This can sometimes have a significant impact on people's perceptions. Because there's generally no editor between the blogger and the general public, blogs can significantly affect a business' image or a political platform. Evident by the tremendous effect blogs had on the last presidential election.
If you're familiar with Matt Drudge, then you know his site has a very powerful following on political issues. Sure, he posts the real news but in the beginning, according to Widipedia.com, "The original issues of the Drudge Report were part gossip and part opinion." And now the site has a worldwide influence on the masses!
The paradigm shift in the Internet information consolidation includes top runners like Technorati.com and numerous other blog directories like BloggerTalk.com. Major article hubs like GoArticles.com and others, are a prime source of information on a variety of topics. And most of the articles are written by the average person who has knowledge or opinions in a certain area. Each of the major article hubs can easily contain hundreds of thousands of articles. But the fact is they are simply super-blogs!
So although you can use a blog for personal reasons like staying in touch with family, friends and co-workers, a blog can be a very powerful marketing tool for promoting your services or products. As you develop a large following, your blog can become a centralized resource for a number of people who are interested in a particular topic. And you can easily monetize your blog by including Google AdSense ads, or sell advertising space to similar blogs or businesses.
The world is changing rapidly and instant access to information is a major player as the reason for that change. Politics, businesses reputation and local issues are just a few of the areas that will increasingly be affected by blogs and their standing in the major search engines.
About the Author
Sydney Nelson is a Microsoft MCP and has a BIT Degree. Please go to http://PromoBlackBoxZone.com for info on enhancing your site's web presence. More articles on Internet Marketing can be found at http://blog.PromoBlackBoxZone.com.
