• John Battelle's Searchblog, Thursday, January 18, 2007 10:45 AM

Search luminary John Battelle weighs in the vague concept of "Blog 2.0," which he outlined during his annual predictions for the New Year. Per his nomenclature, nearly every blog out there can be regarded as "bog 1.0"--including his own Searchblog. But the coming years will see improvements in how bloggers monetize their sites, through a combination of better content management, site navigation, "widgets," and...marketing.

Indeed, bloggers will become savvier at driving traffic to their sites in a bid to compete better with professionally produced content. One problem is that blogs are conversational in nature, possessing a certain rhythm that may be difficult for new readers to tap into. As a result, bloggers should implement special landing pages as part of their search-marketing efforts,giving a short description of what their blog is about. Or maybe a landing page about a given topic could provide links to related information covered in the blog.

It would be even better if the Googles and Yahoos of the world could sell short blurbs when users scroll over paid and maybe even traditional search results. Battelle says this just requires better organization of existing information, and perhaps the cooperation of great information organizers--like Google. After all, he says, some 40% of traffic to blogs comes from search.

Read the whole story at John Battelle's Searchblog »