by John D Carmack

Created on: April 03, 2009

What is a blog, what is SEO, and why write a blog?

Today, Technorati tracks about 133 million blogs.[1] Blogging is truly one of the Web 2.0 wonders. Yet, many still are unaware of what they are and what they can provide.

The term "weblog" was coined back in 1997. In 1999, Peter Merholz, founder of Adaptive Path and former Epinion.com creative director, shortened the term to "blog". He originally sent around links of websites with annotations and got the idea to share it with a wider group of people. He is often now called the "Blog Father".

Blogging software allows you to add content to a website without the hassle of learning a lot of HTML or style sheets. It removes the content from the layout, and it frees the blogger from the headaches normally associated with setting up websites. "Content" used to be mostly text, but images are a common component of blogs as well. Video blogging has now become quite common, which can add to a blog's appeal.

In the beginning, blogs were pretty much the online version of a personal diary. It was a way for friends and family to stay connected, share stories and share photos. Eventually, the idea of using them for business purposes began to catch on. However, it wasn't until the fall of 2003 that the 1 millionth blog came online. A year later, that number had tripled. News blogs about President Bush's National Guard service abounded, and online blog journalism really took off.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often used to raise a site's rankings in search engines and knock down barriers that prevent it from rising in the ranks. Search engines look at the number of searches for keywords that point to the site, what links people select off of the presented links and the number of inbound links to the site. Changes to the HTML can modify the keywords that influence how search engines index the site and its pages. Other sites may be encouraged to link to the site, thus increasing the number of inbound links.

Unfortunately, this latter practice has a dark side to it. Many blogs are spam blogs, or "splogs". They are nothing more than links to other blogs without any real content of their own. Splogs are an artificial way to raise the number of inbound links, and search engines and tagging sites have recently begun to combat them heavily. In many cases, it is counterproductive and turns customers off. However, there are SEO "experts" that will sell such strategies to unwary companies and charge a hefty fee for this. SEO is still unregulated,

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