In today's edition of USA Today, there is an article on the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). The article rehashes some basic tips that Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, offered a small business to help get their website noticed by the major search engines. As USA Today reports:

Winfield has three top tips for Balsam: Her site needs to be linked to from other quality websites. She should have a clear website title. And she needs descriptive copy that includes the search terms (called keywords) that articulate how she wants to be discovered by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, he says.

These tips are, indeed, the starting point for any SEO operation. What is curious, however, is that the article does not make any mention about blogging. Blogs represent a great opportunity to generate keyword sensitive content on a daily basis, something that search engines will notice. As Lee Odden at Top Rank Blog notes:

I sincerely believe using blog software to manage certain kinds of content on a web site such as an online media room, to archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and to provide product updates can make a site that is otherwise very search engine un-friendly, become a viable source of great rankings. This applies to both regular search engines as well as blog search engines.

This shortcoming of the article, however, is unlikely that fault of Chris Winfield. As Winfield mentions on his own blog:

I had a few more [suggestions] that couldn’t be printed due to size constraints