Chris Hooley’s -ThinkBait-

If you were Google, would you want to give blogs a decent chance to rank quicker than old news sites? Let’s say you could even tell the difference between a blog and a splog. Blogs are almost always fresh, relevant content from zealous users who have passion for a topic. It’s almost like news, but not quite.

Newspapers are generally trusted by Google. Let’s consider a few reason why, and lets see if it prevents a few bloggers from whining about why Google let’s newspaper sites rank better, or gives them too much trust.

Here’s a few good reasons newspapers rank better than you

• Newspapers have teams of reporters searching for the latest stories, and teams of writers reporting and breaking news. Bloggers are usually a one man show, and often re-report and spin topics recently reported from established news channels.
• Newspapers have been breaking stories since the dawn of the information age, bloggers just now are tapping into that power.
• Newspaper stories generally go through rounds of rewriting and editing to insure the content is accurate and perfectly presented. (I’m not suggesting it always comes out that way) They put a LOT of effort into the content. A lot.
• There are very few spam newspapers (lets call them spewspapers) screwing it up for the legit news sources and confusing robots as to what is real.
• People quickly link to major news pubs because they generally break stories first, and after years of developing their business and content distribution models, they have developed huge readership that dwarfs any blogger to date.

Moral of the story? If a newspaper article is ruling the SERPs on one of your money terms, maybe you need to improve your site. Maybe you can use a few of their strengths to improve your blog.

• Create something newsworthy (call it buzz marketing, linkbait, or whatever)
• Spend more time perfecting your content
• Write more succinctly and carefully, and edit each post before clicking “publish”
• Work a littler harder on your distribution channels
• Remove the clutter, or at least place it in a better spot (and know the difference between clutter, and buzz, and fun)
• Be an ancient domain with hundreds of thousands of backlinks :-p

Bloggers, we have the opportunity to do some big things here, but we can still learn a thing or two from the tried and true content distribution channels. Work a little harder on your site and eventually you will outrank your competition… the New York Times.

I sent my team an email today about how to leverage your research for SEO / marketing value. After reading it, I thought it would actually make a helpful blog post for those who ask lots of questions.

I am in no way implying anybody is dumb, I just thought that title would be nice and catchy for the blog post. Here’s the email I sent out today:

Hi Team,

Often our jobs require that we need to research a topic… software, new info for content development, changes in the advertising landscape, etc. We “Google” things probably a dozen times per person per day in this department. We also ask each other tons of questions, which is great communication.

There is a way however, that we can get the answers we need AND some SEO value (maybe some links, maybe some buzz) from our own curiosity as well. By visiting forums, blogs, question & answer sites (like answers.yahoo.com), and other social media sites, we can create relevant profiles and even have little signatures that have a link back to our site. We can link to our website in our questions too if it makes sense and is not spammy.

Researching this way has a triple benefit. You can get your questions answered by people who are experts or junkies in a certain area (try visiting a software forum for a question about software, they will probably be very passionate about the discussions), you can help brand our company by being a friendly contributor to these communities, AND you even can help our SEO efforts by getting free links back to our site where it makes sense.

I strongly encourage you to try this method of research, since it will help us expand our presence into the social web and may help us for SEO as well. We might even learn some neat new things that we can bring back to our colleagues here :-)

Keep up the good work guys, you rock!

Now that my team is growing, I can imagine these types of emails will be more frequent than things like “Is this project done yet” or “Can you try this font?” or “Please go get my dry cleaning” (kidding!)

Do you think that emails like this, ones that give broad guidance instead of specifics, are an effective way to manage a large team of web marketing managers and professionals? Seems like the higher up you get in an organization, the more it is about vision than specifics.