Commercial websites believe scoring high placements in search-engine results is so crucial for generating traffic that many are willing to pay top dollar to sponsor keywords or hire "positioning" consultants to secure a good ranking.
Then there are bloggers. With no deliberate effort, many dedicated weblog publishers are finding their blogs rank high on search results for topics that, oftentimes, they claim to know practically nothing about.
Bloggers attribute prominent placement to the frequency with which they publish new material and the fact that other sites often link to their blogs. These are two factors most search engines take into account when determining rankings.
"More and more, I'm running into myself on Google," said Russ Beattie, who publishes a blog from his Madrid home.
"I haven't searched for something completely random and found my own blog, but I have searched for specifics on technologies that I've expressed opinions on a few weeks earlier and had to click through my own postings on numerous occasions," Beattie said in an e-mail.
Other Web surfers are also being directed to Beattie's blog. In a 24-hour period this week, Beattie said he got more than 150 click-throughs from Google users, including searches on such keywords as "Kim Possible" (a Disney cartoon), "Screen Flipper," "Lotus 1,2,3 menu structure for cars," and "birthday card special agent."
"I do remember mentioning that I liked Kim Possible, but the rest don't make much sense," he said.
Still, Beattie is far from the only blogger who's seeing even his most cursory references to a place, idea or technology result in search engine-generated traffic.
Scott Gowell, of Lansing, Michigan, had a similar experience after making a brief reference on his blog, Sinekow, to an incident at a local mall. Much later, when he looked up the mall online hoping to find a listing of stores, Gowell's first search result linked to his own blog.
Another time, Gowell said, he and fellow students in a programming class posted a question online about how to implement a sound feature using Java 3D. The query generated a high enough search-engine ranking that many other novice programmers e-mailed the students with questions.
Pete Prodoehl, who publishes the technology blog RasterWeb, says it's common for search-engine queries on topics he's commented briefly about to point users to his site. He believes the trick to achieving prominent search rankings is fairly straightforward: "update frequently and provide good content."
Still, easy as it may be for certain blogs to generate high traffic from search-engine users, many commercial websites struggle to rank high in online searches related to their business.
Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect, a service that helps site operators improve search-engine rankings, says that companies often don't realize that they're competing for placement not only with traditional rivals but with anyone who posts online.
"The Web is absolutely the great equalizer," he said. "Good content rises to the top on the Internet. It doesn't matter if the medium is a blog or a corporate Web page."
Marckini said many corporate websites do not generate as much traffic from search-engine queries as they could because they don't maintain static URLs for internal pages. This prevents search-engine crawlers from indexing those pages and including them in query results.
Many bloggers, on the other hand, post long scrolls of text on homepages or on a small number of internally linked pages, making it easier for crawlers to access them.
That said, efforts by commercial sites to improve positioning appear to be working for basic keywords. Random searches of a dozen generic and proper nouns produced no blogs in the top five results.
However, searches that included the word "hate" along with a generic noun or company name were highly likely to generate a blog among the top results. In searches containing the keywords "hate Microsoft," "hate Britney Spears," and "hate liverwurst," for example, blogs showed up prominently in the results.
Marckini says high rankings of blogs in "hate"-related searches is probably because bloggers use more emotional, informal language on their pages than commercial sites do.
Moreover, he said, "I don't know that hate has a big commercial application."
