133377 Resource 100177 24 24 1152389733298 1160359861051 Controlled ActiveRain Real Estate Portal

While the idea seems good on paper, communities of weblogs struggle for visibility and are at a distinct discovery disadvantage.

Why do blog portals and communities struggle? The short answer is relevance. Here's a scenario that will help you understand what I mean.If you give a single blogger three categories (i.e., channels with very specific titles that focus on separate topics) and you encourage him/her to write lots of blog posts, the content in each channel will be approximately focused on the pre-defined titles of each channel category. If you give 200 bloggers each a blog channel about themselves (or focused on their name or company name), they will write about anything and everything on their minds - e.g., the content will lack a specific focus. In this scenario, search engines will see each blog in the community as a collection of disparate ideas. Furthermore, the search engines will see the weblog portal as an even more disparate collection of ideas and mildly related subjects.Search engines love focused content - the more a content channel is about ONE thing, the more likely it will be recommendable by an engine when visitors call for that EXACT subject. For this reason, community blog content is hoplessly at a competitive disadvantage if your objective is to rank high in search results and for many terms.Here are some real [Google] examples from ActiveRain...<ul><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=The+New+Real+Estate+Bubble" target="_blank">The New Real Estate Bubble</a> (not ranked in the top 100)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Real+Estate+blogs+" target="_blank">Real Estate Blogs</a> (not ranked in the top 100)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=Micro+Business+Loans" target="_blank">Micro Business Loans</a> (not ranked in the top 100)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=The+Four+Seasons+-+One+Day+At+A+Time+" target="_blank">The Four Seasons - One Day At A Time</a> (not ranked in the top 100)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-US&q=Why+advertise+the+competition%3F" target="_blank">Why advertise the competition?</a> (not ranked in the top 100)</li></ul>Here are some blog visibility examples from a few "brand-greedy" real estate bloggers; <a href="http://blog.vailpropertysearch.com/" target="_blank">Vail Property Search</a> in Vail, Colorado and <a href="http://snowhome.blogsite.com/" target="_blank">SnowHome</a> in Summit County, Colorado.<ul><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vail+valley+golf+course+living" target="_blank">Vail Valley Golf Course Living</a> (#1 and #2)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=3+bed%2F3bath+Townhome+West+Vail" target="_blank">3 bed/3bath Townhome West Vail</a> - (#1)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=Fourth+of+July+Vail+2006" target="_blank">Fourth of July Vail 2006</a> - (#1 and #2)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=Second+homes+dominate+economy" target="_blank">Second homes dominate economy</a> - (#3)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=Are+Deed+Restricted+Units+Second+Homes%3F" target="_blank">Are Deed Restricted Units Second Homes?</a> - (#1 and #2)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=Golfing+in+Summit+County" target="_blank">Golfing in Summit County</a> - (#5 and #6)</li><li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=Golf+in+Summit+County" target="_blank">Golf in Summit County</a> - (#10)</li></ul>These examples demonstrate why focus and content relevance matters. But the issues concerning the blogging architecture are many. For example, the keyword tags added to posts in ActiveRain are not <a href="http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html" target="_blank">tag-service compliant</a>. This is important if you want to participate in the emerging benefits of tagging - one benefit is better indexing of your content by search engines. SnowHome (one of the companies in the search examples) has a <a href="http://snowhome.blogsite.com/topics" target="_blank">Topic Cloud</a> of their tags which enhances discoverability by search engines and visitors.I used the term "brand-greedy" above; to clarify, this is a new idea that has emerged because most blogging tools dictate the URL of your weblog. Brand-greedy companies want the URL to be similar or a superset of their primary web site domain name. In weblog portals and communities, all the inbound links you generate with your content are given to the community, not your own brand or company domain. This is yet another success factor when blogging for better Internet visibility. 10 application/xml false ActiveRain community blogs real estate relevance weblog portals Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Maxthon; Dosware Team Internet Browser; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 bfrench false true false false true 174031 false false true false false false true 100177 blog blogsite/BFrench/web