Want to write a better blog? Stop trusting Google

Feb 23rd, 2009 | By John Roach | Category: Big Picture

As a writer and a blogger, you need two things — great content and people to read it. That much you know. But what you don’t know is the best way to get both is to give up on Google.com and make your own Google search engine.

Custom search engines let you decide what sites are valuable enough to appear in your research. Defining a finely tuned pool of resources to link to and quote from will make your posts more authoritative and build relationships with other bloggers.

How is this different from what I’m already doing?

While many bloggers often link to interesting or insightful posts and pages that they come across, and indeed many bloggers do only this, what I am suggesting you do is to be more active. Instead of waiting until something catches your eye, write the eye-catching content yourself and back it up with authoritative sources. When writing your post, you can see what a trusted few blogs and websites have said on the subject and incorporate it .

Producing valuable, original content backed by experts is transformative; you’ll go from saying “Hey, Seth Godin said something cool” to saying “Hey, I said something cool, and Seth Godin agrees with me.” By being more active than reactive, you increase your worth.

Why not just use vanilla Google?

Setting up a custom search engine takes time and effort — why bother, when Google returns great results anyway? By evaluating and limiting your sources, you can consistently refer to only the most valuable, insightful, and useful content. Taking the extra time to set up and tune your own search results will produce more effective research for you and more valuable content for your readers.

Who’s worthy of being in my search engine?

In any niche, there’s going to be a handful of giants that you simply cannot ignore. They are visited, linked to, and quoted from the most. For example, in my niche one of these would be the Perdue online writing lab.

Once you’ve determined who the heavy hitters are, dig deeper. Check out their blogrolls, ask on Twitter and do a Google search for “Top (insert niche here) sites.”

Once you’ve assembled a healthy set of sites to search across, it’s time to use one of custom search’s best features: refining. By tagging your sources with labels, you can filter your search results. In my search engine, I’ve got grammar, writing, errors, and etymology. Label your sources according to their strengths and you can save time when writing your posts.

All right, I’ve got my mini-Google, now what?

Now you’ve got your post idea. Before you start writing, hop on over to your custom search engine and search through there. What do your authorities say? Give them credit for saying it. If you’ve got a great source that would benefit your readers, it would be criminal not to link to it. You can search for sources that agree with your take on a subject, find a consensus before reaching your own conclusion, or take any number of other approaches.

Just remember to provide the best content for your readers and be generous with links, and the readers will come.