As I mentioned previously, I think we’re only a few years (maybe 2) away from every reasonably savvy small company bypassing the traditionally expensive “bespoke” website in favour of a blog-based site, whether they use it in the traditional “blog” sense of the word, or simply use the technology as basically free CMS. [Full disclosure: our parent firm, new sun creative derives about 50% of its revenue from these custom “bespoke” websites, so this change is scary for us]. It’s simply too cheap and easy to stay out of the mainstream for long. I am also assuming that at some point most of the major blog software players will provide packages that are “professional” (along the lines of Movable Type’s Enterprise and TypePad Business Class software). Don’t want to pay? All the rest need to do to force the issue is change their terms of use.

How will all this change how your Google search results page looks? Right now, blogs have the upper hand: they’re updated all the time, have lots of links in and out and therefore get great Googlejuice. But when every site is a blog, using all the SMO tricks of the trade, this advantage will be lost. I would suggest that the new art of “Social Media Optimization” (phrase coined by Rohit Bhargava) will be the new search engine optimization (SEO).