It's been a long absence for my thoughts in Peripheral Vision, but I think I'll get jiggy with regular posts again. To the point of this Realty Blogging article - I agree with assertion that if you write good content and it's highly focused and well tagged, you'll do well in the search engines. However, this writer is not very clear about why this is generally true, nor is he forthcoming about markets that are ultra-competitive like upscale resort properties and other hotly contested markets. Lastly, he couches this as a "proof-of-concept" -- the folks at Real Estate Blogsites have created a production version of this concept and they've been using it for more than a year; for them, this is far beyond a concept. Disclaimer - I'm a co-founder at MyST Technology Partners, the creators of the Blogsite platform. There is no free lunch with organic search success - it requires lots of effort and a keen understanding of long-tail search dynamics. Most articles like this lead you to believe that massive traffic is the outcome for a few top page ranks in Google for any key-phrase. This is simply not the case. Your objective in organic search optimization should be a few clicks per month on very discrete search terms. If you work consistently at your blogging, you'll eventually have ten thousand discrete phrases that will attract 1-point-something search referrals per month, or maybe twenty thousand new visitors per month to your blogsite brand. The long-tail is not conjecture - it's proven science; 95% of all productive search traffic on the net is based on unpopular terms and phrases. Chasing popular (or predictable) terms is likely to waste time and precious marketing resources. If you chase any key phrase that you think is predictable, the chances are excellent that (a) your competitors think it's predictable as well, and (b) it's not as predictable as you might believe (e.g., PR and the Unpredictable Long-Tail). So let's look more closely at the claimed benefit of the Lake County Blog as so eloquently stated in the article. The assertion is that the blog created the high visibility and resulting page one Google ranking, but the actual link in Google points to The Crockett Team website. Hmmm - looks like someone's confused. In fact, the Lake County Blog referenced in the article doesn't even rank in the top 100 results in Google. Granted, Google has had some troubles of late so maybe I'm hitting the index at a bad time. But if I'm right about this, the high rankings you're seeing here probably have little to do with the weblog mentioned and more to do with traditional SEO effort - specifically Number 1 Expert. It's obvious this site was optimized by this tool - just look at the title tag in the HTML source. While I believe weblogs are superior tools for creating sustainable visibility and brand awareness, I like to give credit where credit is due. <TITLE>Mentor, Concord and Painesville Township Ohio real estate listings,
home buying, selling and relocation information - NUMBER1EXPERT(tm)</TITLE> The article is clear about one thing - use tags that accurately describe the focus of your content. You'll get no debate from me about the importance of tags and tagging accuracy. In fact, you'll see a series of tags called out at the end of this blog post that reference Topic Tags; this is driven by an exclusive technology known as Topic Cloud and available in every blogsite created by Real Estate Blogsites. Topic Tags pick up where keyword tags end; this product overview describes some of the more technical nuances of this very powerful technology. To demonstrate why tagging, RSS, and weblogs are important, I wrote this post at about 5pm [mountain time] today and at 6:45pm it is ranked #1 in Yahoo's new MyWeb search engine, a search system designed to leverage tags and feeds. There's no trickery here, and I suspect [eventually] this article won't be number one, but at this moment it's the most relevant conversation about Lake County Ohio Real Estate in this search engine. | 
