One in an occasional series on secrets to blogging.
If your site is like mine, it gets a sizable fraction of its readership from people who type things into the main Google search index and click through. More than half the traffic comes from that, and on a typical day 80%+ of the visitors are new.
Search traffic coming from other search engines are relatively small, almost to the level of being noise - even though, for some search terms, the arguably 'best answer' for those searches is not anything I wrote but some targeted, focused search in some other database other than GOOG.
If you're doing your homework, you should be able to do homework for your readers. Find a popular search term that's driving traffic to an existing page, identify an alternate database with better resources than what a simple Google search will unearth, and add to your existing copy. I find Google Books to be a good source, especially for pre-1922 materials which give some historical perspective on the matter. Amazon and your favorite library are good book reference sources. Thousands of other databases have awful user interfaces and hidden away content which can be selectively referenced for good effect.
This is neatly summarized by Steve Fuller in his 2001 book Knowledge management foundations
Public ignorance thus ascends to the meta-level of not knowing the expert system in which the relevant expertise is contained.
and thus as a blogger you have an opportunity to pull from one unfamiliar expert system into a familiar non-expert system.
