Google is huge in search. As in really huge.

None of us will ever have the traffic Google has to its search page (according to Search Engine Land in Dec 2012, 114.7 billion searches were conducted on Google’s search engine in that one month—80% of all the searches in the world.)

But here’s a neat concept. Every day Google is offering to share a bit of that traffic with you. And for free. Now that’s a great deal.

The only problem is it’s such a great deal everyone wants in. So every business out there is competing for their slice of the Google traffic pie. It’s like the day when the Mega Millions lottery has a prize of $500 million. Get in line.

Grabbing this bit of the Google pie (or Bing or Yahoo pie—smaller pies but tasty nonetheless) is something we in the digital world call “Search Engine Optimization” (or to confuse you even more “SEO”).

To get some traffic from Google you need to score well in the “Google exam”. Google is constantly examining all the Websites in the world to see how they score for different words (called “keywords” by the people that make up words for the Internet).

So Google’s search engine looks at your website and says do you have a good site for the keywords somebody just typed into me?

How does Google define “good”?

Google wants to know if one of the pages on your website uses the words I, the searcher, has just typed in (jargon = “relevance”). The other major factor that Google considers is do a lot of websites “point” to your website by linking to you (jargon = “authority”).

If you have the words I’m typing into Google on your web page AND you have a high “authority” (lots of people point to you), Google is going to put you high up on my search results page.

High up, especially on page one, of the search results for what I typed in is critical as research from Chitika (via Search Engine Watch) show the search results on page 1 get 92% of the all the users’ clicks, leaving only 8% of traffic for everyone else.

Up to this point, I’ve been talking about your website but secretly I’ve known since the beginning of this post that I’m really not just talking about your website but actually about your blog as well.

Here’s the thing. A blog is just a tool to publish web pages. Blog software like WordPress or Hubspot let you publish web pages easily by just typing stuff into an editor as if you were typing into Microsoft Word.

From Google’s perspective it does not matter if a web page is a “website web page” or a “blog web page”. They are all web pages.

What’s cool about blog web pages is that they get updated. That happens because they are easy to update. And when something is easy to do then we humans do it.

If you don’t have a blog and don’t have a content management system (a fancy word for something that looks a lot like a blog on the administrative side) on your website then what happens is you don’t update your web pages nor do you produce new web pages very often (at all!)

Google does not like stale web pages. They don’t smell good. Stale web pages, especially ones that just promote your business rather than educate, don’t get links from other websites either. These pages soon drop down the Google rankings and are often replaced by nice clean smelling blog web pages.

Bottom line: to get your slice of Google’s pie you probably need a blog.