Conversation Search Optimization

What a fascinating post over on Backbone Media.

I had never really given much though to SEO on blogs - or should that read "how to stay on the front page of Technorati".

It seems obvious, to those in the game, that there is a clear difference between relevancy search engines and RSS-based conversation search engines.

Yet this difference is perhaps just as invisible to the normal client as the reason why Search Engine Optimization is so important to any online presence.

In John's post, he points out that in order to stay on the front page in your particular field, all you have to do is post more often than the time the last article on the page was listed.

In his example, the last post under "Business blogging" was posted 2 days ago, meaning that to maintain a ranking on the first page a blogger would have to write at least every 2 days. For subjects way, way down the long tail, like "synthetic transparency", that frequency diminished considerably, allowing bloggers to stay on the top page writing just one article per year.

In the IT world, this becomes a little more difficult as the frequency for internationally-known brand is much higher. In Acer's case, at time of writing, the last article on the first page was published under an hour ago making it almost impossible to stay on the first page for conversations alone. Dell has a much harder time with posts required every 16 minutes...

I am, like many others, still climbing the steep learning curve of blog effectiveness but conversation search optimization is certainly a concept I'll be keeping an eye on.