103899 Resource 102363 102466 102466 1128049691964 1128354790183 Controlled Can you raise your internet business visibility through a corporate weblog?

When you really start to think about who searches and finds your ideas and insights on the internet, you realize it's everybody

Attended an interesting meeting in Ann Arbor tonight devoted to the hot topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). One of the subjects covered was the use of corporate blogging as a means of communicating with your audience and raising your search engine rankings at the same time. Andy Seidl of MyST Technologies was in the audience. They are the folks behind <A href="http://www.blogsite.com/">blogsite.com</A>. (You may have noticed that this site runs on their technology, and that I am a channel partner - just being honest up front.) Andy makes an excellent point when he talks about the difficulty of trying to fashion a website for SEO - its a never ending 'arms race' as Andy puts it. The search engines are always on the lookout for tricks of the trade that developers use to game the system, and then they figure out how to avoid them. The best way to handle SEO is with content, good, honest content created the old-fashioned way, with a keyboard. Alternatively you can create it the new-fashioned way - a podcast. One question came up tonight which I thought was a good case study of how the internet, blogging and SEO permeate modern business in ways that make professionals in the business shake their heads. A gentleman from a marketing firm talked about a current client with whom he's working. The idea that they want to pitch is a corporate blogsite. It would a great way to raise the client's internet visibility while also providing a forum for communication with the client's clientele, current and prospective. But the hitch, in the pitch as it were, is that the client, a consulting firm, works with senior management of large companies, and the marketing firm is not sure that a blogsite would ever reach this level. Are C-level executives of Fortune 1000 firms reading blogs, or searching the internet? Well, probably not, frankly. (Although I think this is changing, too, by the day) But my response was that all large companies have a team of people whose job it is to search the internet, and anywhere else humans communicate, to find competitive intelligence and information important to the executives involved in strategic planning. So if the marketing firm's client published useful information - knowledge - pertinent to an executive's strategic function, someone will find it and it will ultimately end up on the executive's inbox. Maybe I'm a little optimistic here, but a corporate blogsite in concert with an electronic newsletter , both with real and valuable content, is a great way to communicate. Even to the C-level. 10 application/xml false business visibility corporate blogsite internet visibility search engine optimization seo Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; YPC 3.0.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 69.212.126.205 69.212.126.205 tfoydel false true false false true 205861 false false true false false false true 102363 blog blogsite/SightLines/web