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Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past year, you've probably heard the buzz about blogs. It seems you can't fire up your browser without reading a story about how blogs are changing the way people communicate and do business online.

In case you're new to blogs...

Blogs – short for Web Logs – are simple, templated websites that enable people with no technical knowledge to publish on the Internet.

But beyond the hype (it does seem like everyone and their cat has a blog these days), blogs just may have also stumbled upon the perfect formula for the ultimate high-ranking page in Google—here's why:

* Blogs are updated frequently and visited often by Search Engines

* Blogs gain PageRank quickly

* Blogs easily acquire an abundance of inbound links

* Blogs are content-rich and topic-focused

* Blogs can attract intensely loyal readership

What if your online business website could harness the power of the blog?

Developing and maintaining a successful blog isn't easy—it takes dedication and hard work. But once you've established loyal subscribers and high visibility, you've created a way to intimately communicate with online customers and send targeted traffic directly to your commercial web site—not to mention the fact that your blog can now link to your online business, sending some high PageRank fallout your way.

What is a blog, anyway? How is it different from other web sites? And what are those trackbacks that everyone's talking about? Let's demystify the jargon and walk through the blogosphere (the global network of blogs) step-by-step...

What exactly is a blog?

The word blog is short for web log and refers to a web site written in a diary format, with regular entries, or posts, by the blog author. Blogs can cover any topic and can even be written by multiple authors. Perhaps the best way to familiarize yourself with blogs is to read one of the more popular ones:

FastLane Blog — This blog is one of the best examples of a business using a blog to promote itself. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz writes about cars (particularly GM cars) and the auto industry in a candid and interesting way, and his blog has created a huge following. 

Let's face it, most car buffs don't have much reason to check out the GM corporate site everyday, but they do tune in regularly to hear what Bob Lutz has to say about cars (because he says it so well). As for Lutz, he gets to interact directly with his consumers, link to GM's official web site, and promote GM and their products.

What do blogs look like?

Blogs tend to list the most recent post at the top of the page, with the posts getting older as you scroll down. This tends to be the model your readers will expect, and most blogging software is configured this way.

A typical blog post includes a title, the body of the post, optional images, the date and time of the post, a permalink (or permanent link to the post), a comment link for readers to leave their feedback, and a trackback link (which we'll cover in a moment).

What makes blogs different from other web sites?

There are a few important ways blogs differ from regular web pages. First, blogs are designed to be frequently and easily updated. Creating a new blog post usually involves nothing more than entering some text into a form and clicking Submit. No HTML or programming skills are required.

This is great from a search engine point of view because search engines love frequently updated pages. If a search engine finds that your page is being updated every day, it'll return to re-index your page every day to ensure that it always has the most recent copy of your site.

In contrast, if your pages never change, search engines will usually only return to re-index your pages every month or so. This lack of search engine attention can put your site at a ranking disadvantage. Further, search engines will also take longer to find new pages on your site, since they're visiting your site less frequently.

The second important way that blogs differ from normal web pages is that they actively promote and distribute themselves throughout the Internet using a technology called RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (It can also mean Rich Site Summary, depending on which version you're talking about). But what the acronym stands for really isn't important—it's what RSS can do for your blog that's hugely important.

RSS is the technology that allows people to subscribe to your blog. Instead of people coming to your site to read your blog posts, they use software called an aggregator, or feed reader, to make your blog posts come to them. Your blog posts are automatically sent to the subscriber's computer where they can pick and choose which of your posts interests them.

Using RSS saves time because now subscribers don't have to repeatedly check back with a site to see if there's been an update. Instead, the information is fed to them as it's created. As the amount of information we have to process each day continues to grow, RSS gives us a way to automate our web surfing, allowing us to absorb even more information more quickly. Now even your web surfing (and your procrastinating) can be done more productively!

And RSS isn't just for blogs. Most major news outlets, including the Associated Press, Business Week, and the New York Times, all provide RSS feeds of their content to make it easier for people to keep up with the latest headlines. E-commerce sites like Froogle and MSN Shopping are also getting in on the action, providing RSS feeds of their latest products and prices.

RSS may sound innocent enough, but it may bring with it some profound ramifications. As more people rely on RSS to bring their information to them, fewer are going to be using search engines to go out and find that information themselves, which could have a great effect on the way web pages are optimized for traffic.

If blogs and RSS are here to stay—and we're predicting that they are—then ranking highly in search engines is likely to become less important, while getting customers to subscribe to your RSS feed will become increasingly critical to your business' success.