A Business Blog By Any Other Name

“There is not a better way to add relevant content to your website on a regular basis than to utilize a blog,”  says Nicole Beachum  of socialmediatoday.com. “If you do not want to call it a blog, you can call it a “learning center” or any other catchphrase that you want to use to categorize the frequent posts to your website—at the end of the day they are blogs and these blogs are powerful,” asserts the digital marketing advisor.

“For most small businesses, they do not have the financial resources to run a bunch of advertising and marketing campaigns. Many don’t have the resources to even have a professionally designed and optimized website built.  At least with blogging and some simple SEO you can do yourself, you still have an opportunity to be present, be found, and get your business in front of your target market,” chimes in Chris Eggleston.

So, have the latest changes in Google’s algorithm taken away that opportunity to be present and found?  Newbie blog content writers and business owners alike have been asking me that question, having gotten a whiff of  “Hummingbird”, the latest iteration in Google’s attempt to render the matchmaking process between searchers and providers ever more effective.

As Jim Yu of All Things SEO explains it, “Hummingbird allows the Google search engine to better do its job through an improvement in semantic search.  As conversational search becomes the norm, Hummingbird lends understanding to the intent and contextual meaning of terms used in a query.”

Search engine results pages were often polluted with misleading results, explains marketingprofs.com. With Hummingbird technology, the “search engine is better able to discern the relationships between words and thus the context and the user’s intent, delivering a much more relevant search result.”

As my associate Bob Chenoweth explains it, Hummingbird is good news for developers of high-quality content, but bad news for keyword stuffers.” At Say It For You, we’re looking forward to the best matchmaking since Yenta in “Fiddler on the Roof”.