"People still want porn. People will always want porn. However, Internet smut is no longer a novelty."

According to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State, sex isn’t as popular as it used to be seven years ago.

Settle down. They’re not talking about the act of sex. What these learned educators are talking about is the word sex as a search term.

In the publication “Web Search: Public Searching of the Web”, the authors determined that in 1997, 20% of web surfers used the word sex as a keyword. Now, it’s about 5%. Basically, the study finds that the bloom is off the rose. Porn is less of a priority to today’s web surfer.

Don’t be sad. People still want porn. People will always want porn. However, Internet smut is no longer a novelty.

Take heart. There’s an upside to the end of the honeymoon. E-Commerce searches have increased 86% in the past seven years. People aren’t as afraid to spend money as they were in 1997. What has all this to do with blogging? It’s all about keywords and search terms.

In the above-mentioned publication, the authors found that surfers are still fairly simplistic when it comes to using a search engine. Most surfers only use two keywords per query and perform two queries per search session. Until someone builds a better search, the whole of the Internet population is stuck with what they get when they type their two keywords and click the button.

That’s one reason why blogs rule. If you run a blog, you already know. Search engines love blogs. Most bloggers publish new content on a daily basis. Sometimes, several times a day. Bloggers also love to link to other blogs. As you probably know, search engine crawlers always scan sites in their index for recent updates and external linkage. The more a page is linked to and the more often it is updated, the higher that site is ranked on an SE.

Take my blog. I wrote a bit about a fairly well known adult Internet entrepreneur. Let’s call him Joey Blowe. I wrote the piece well over three months ago and I’m still getting SE hits from keyword searches such as: “Joey Blowe”, “Who is Joey Blowe” and “Joey Blow Pornographer”.

When I wrote about the industry AIDS scare that happened this last summer, my blog went crazy with SE traffic. In fact, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t get a hit or two because of that post. If I write about 2257 or COPA, I get SE hits. If I write about politics, I get SE hits. Hell, I’m even getting GOOGLE image search hits now because of graphics I made for my blog.

Truth be told, I’m a very lazy blogger. I make new posts maybe once a week on average. I don’t promote the thing as well as I could. I don’t link to very many other people’s blogs. And still, I keep getting SE hits. I can only imagine how much traffic I could garner if I posted as regularly to my blog as others do.

As any adult webmaster will tell you, search engine traffic is golden. When surfers arrive at your page from an SE search, they arrive of their own, free will. They arrive because your listing appeared on first-page results. They come because of a symbiotic relationship between your text and your surfer’s keyword searches. A willing, pro-active customer is the best kind of customer. You don’t have to lure them with a gallery or paid ad. They are on your page because they made the decision to go there.

This is the first part of a two-part article on why blogs rule. I’ve explained that surfers aren’t as interested in searching for sex as they were when the web was new and shiny. I’ve explained that surfers are more inclined to search for goods and stuff to buy than they were in '97. I’ve shown you that an excellent method for obtaining SE traffic is by creating a blog.

In part two of this article, I’ll show you that a blog is really another version of a tried-and-true adult webmaster format for a successful site. I’ll show you the second reason why blogs rule!

** Click Here For: Blogs Rule! - Part #2