Google Juice

I've seen Robert Scoble refer to the term "Google Juice" a few times without really understanding it. I read a post about it this morning at the Church of the Customer blog that made me want to find out more.

I grabbed the following from the article:

The more inbound links to you, the higher your Google ranking. Frequent and interesting blog posts encourage inbound links. Write more posts, get more links. While it's not quite that easy, it beats paying big bucks for search engine optimation services.

and then the post itself contained a link to a wiki with this defintion:

Google uses the term PageRank in-house to mean the score that they give to each web page. When it was google.stanford.edu, Google search results included a small graphic indicating how much PageRank each page has. Now that search results no longer include PageRank (unless you have the google toolbar), people use the term Google Juice to mean "the mysterious quality that causes pages to come up high in a Google search."

To Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo it means they are the number one Robert and Chris respectively in a Google Search. In a business sense this means a blog (providing people link to it) can move you up the search engine rankings for whatever term or terms you blog about.

This got me thinking about how you put a value on coming first in a Google Search? If you can put a value on it, and if that value is large enough, then you can persuade companies of the virtue of blogging (and to be fair, the virtue of search engine optimisation). From there it should be a simple step to view blogging as a marketable skill - the skill being judged by capability to change the ranking of defined terms. It doesn't, however, appear to me that such a marketplace is evolving. Or am i missing something? I'm guessing that lots of companies are not yet clued into the value of blogging. Is it also true that they are not clued into search engine optimisation? If that is true then it's a small leap to say that many companies still don't understand the internet and that there's still a large marketplace in educating corporates on the fundamentals of the connected universe.

UPDATE: I forgot the first thought that made me write this post, which was, I can't quite picture what would be involved in getting to be the first "Steve" on a Google Search. Searching for "Steve Newson", the best I can manage is page three. I don't exactly have a common last name, but I share "Steve Newson" with an Electromagnetic Interference Consultant and a baseball player.