• by Tom Hespos , July 12, 2005

My second cousin Susan, who shares my last name, is slowly but surely gaining ground on me.

For years, I've enjoyed the top listings on Google and Yahoo! under my last name. Hespos.com has always come up No. 1, and anyone searching for me could easily find my online home. Recently, however, Susan's faculty profile on a Web page at Vanderbilt has taken over the No. 1 slot on Yahoo! under "Hespos" and her listings are climbing up the relevance ladder to overtake many of mine, including the listing for the Hespos.com Web site. (I still, however, own No. 1 on Google. Heh heh.)

What did the trick for Susan?

A lot of it has to do with some buzz Susan made over the past year among bloggers. Susan does a good deal of research on the cognitive abilities of infants, and she released a couple papers a while ago about spatial organization in infants and what infants are thinking before they start talking. These papers spawned discussion in the blogosphere, and many bloggers linked back to her research and to her profile over at Vanderbilt's site. As the discussion continues and more bloggers post on these topics, Susan gets many more inbound links to increase her relevance to "Hespos."

Not all is lost, however. There's plenty of stuff I put out that gets bandied about by bloggers. But the big difference is that Susan has an online focal point for her research and my online base of operations is somewhat less focused. For instance, plenty of the articles I write for MediaPost are talked about by bloggers. But the bloggers rarely link to Hespos.com. They link to the individual columns on MediaPost, which makes sense. Hespos.com is less a focus for online marketing articles than places like the Spin Board or the article archives where MediaPost stores my weekly musings.

But occasionally, I will post thoughts on online marketing to Hespos.com. There are a few articles there that are helping me from a search listings perspective. Two articles in particular, one that discusses the efficacy of blogs as an online advertising environment and the other that I wrote as a follow-up to the first article, having garnered quite a few postings and comments from bloggers. The bigger point is that much of the relevance to the term I desire is driven by the constant commenting and re-commenting on ideas that both Susan and I have posted online.

What can we learn from all of this? Well, the first minor point is that if I wanted to maintain my relevance to the search term "Hespos," I ought to make some changes to how articles are organized online and give bloggers a single place to link to when they pick up on my commentary.

But an important learning that can be ported over to conversations with clients is that relevance is conversation-driven. To achieve higher degrees of relevance to desired search terms, an effective strategy is to get out there and join the conversation.

Becoming easier to find and becoming an authority in one's particular market sector are both compelling reasons to get aboard with a business blog. Bloggers are influential in more ways than one, and if your business starts communicating with them in meaningful ways, not only is there the opportunity to advance loyalty to your brand, but also an opportunity to benefit in a real way from natural search relevance. I'd, of course, argue that the former is more important than the latter, but the very real benefits to search listing relevance can be an important side benefit that might bring certain businesses closer to the tipping point with regard to getting a blog online.