Thanks for following up… While potentially overloading you with even more information, you made me think of two interesting follow up points…

1) There’s no need for SEO with a blog. No kidding. At its most basic level, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a way to trick search engines into believing that bad content is valuable. I’ve never done any traditional SEO with this site and we rank really well with Google. We’ve got lots of good real estate content on this site and so there is no need to “trick” the search engines into believing that we do. Put another way, if you provide the highest quality content on a particular issue, then Google does their best to send traffic your way. So you can either feed the search engines crap (bad content) and try to trick them into believing that you are offering something valuable (this normally involves lots of money buying links), or you can feed them good food (quality content) and they will love you for it!

2) This blog has a huge amount of HTML code behind it, (more than Anna’s original website), so it is definitely not an absence of HTML code. But this does lead to an interesting tip-of-the-day. Did you know that you can right-click and select “View Page Source” (”option-click” on a Mac) on any webpage to get the html code that created the page. I use this all the time to find out how someone got a particular feature to look the way it does on a webpage.

I don’t know too much about SEO but, I would guess that blogs do well compared to websites because blogs are not loaded with html and other code the way websites are. Thus, keyword ratios are better on blogs.

Just my 2 cents worth!

Have a great evening,
Mark

The community blog network I was referring to is separate from the network of blogging evangelists we’re creating at Realty Blogging. In effect, I was talking about a community blog platform. An online hyperlocal community “newspaper” like blog hosted by realtors. The content of which is generally contributed by about 10 members of the local community. Community organizations frequently post about local news, events and information, creating a great deal of community interaction and amiably marketing the host.
It’s a pretty cool tool for realtors looking to market their busniess and connect with their community…without having to show all of their listings!

Great question… I’m not sure I know the answer to that question, although it does remind me of a post I just read I Can’t Define Pornography, But I Know it When I Squint at it. The author of that post is definitely in my “community” because I know and like the guy offline as well as online. When talking about community in this post, I was definitely envisioning something much closer to the latter example you gave “an affinity-based community that is knit together via common interests?”

But your blogging network you are creating is also a community… A online community is created when people have a place where they feel like they not only have an interest in the overall dialog, but they also want to take part in the conversation. In other words, I may not be able to define it well, but I know it when I see it because it interests me!

I was all geared up to write a post on Realty Blogging specifically about your reference to a community of bloggers because it ties in very nicely with Blogging Systems community publisher. Though, I should ask, what do you mean by ‘community’?
“The REASON blogs tend to perform better in search engine results than typical webpages is a direct result of the community that has created them. When done right, a community of bloggers share links with each other and not just any links, but deep links associated with quality content. To create a blog without the intention of creating community (or loyal readers for that matter) is to completely misunderstand the marketing potential of blogs.”
Are you referring to a community blog network, such as Blogging Systems provides, or an affinity-based community that is knit together via common interests?

Thanks for the head’s up… That’s an interesting message board. I ran across the site a while back, but I don’t remember seeing such a high quantity of good information.

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/showthread.php?p=44889#post44889

Let me clarify one or two more points, so that we all get where I am coming from and my main theses:

1. I love blogs – true blogs that talk a lot about all sorts of different subjects – politics, culture, real estate marketing, or any other subject I am interested in. I am a believer in the blog concept, and the blog community.

2. Don’t confuse my efforts as a “real estate internet marketing blogger” and my efforts at selling Chicago real estate. They are two totally different, separate approaches to using a web site to drive business. Both work.

My Realtor internet marketing blog is a true blog – it’s opinion, commentary, “what’s new”, etc, etc. I’d love to have a great conversation and about the subject, and I’m not so interested in anyone signing up for anything or providing me with an email address to view that site’s content – it’s more of a credibility building tool and a way to become an opinion leader in the field.

But the Realtor web site is a totally different animal. It is NOT a blog at all if you consider the traditional blog concept. I don’t think I have a single comment on the site, nor any trackbacks, and I’m not really interested in havng any. In fact, I think I’ll go into my templates some time in the near future and remove the ability to comment and view trackbacks. It is blatantly promotional, as it needs to be for me to acheive my overriding goal – providing the ability to search the Chicago MLS for free.

Having people search for real estate through my site is the single most important goal I have. It just so happens that I use blogging software to get that job done. Blogging software is superbly designed for every level of internet user out there – if you can type, you can publish a web site that has wonderful internal linking structures, includes the capability to use RSS out-of-the-box, and has a ton of third party tools available at your disposal. And to top it all off, a lot of these services are either free or extremely inexepensive.

How could anyone find fault with that?

The alternatives for a Realtor are to go sign up with iHouse or Z57, or Alamode, and in my opinion, those aren’t very good alternatives.

Thanks for the backlinks, though, even if they are “nofollow”. I’m happy to reciprocate.