I have a couple quick questions;

#1: When blogging you have an opportunity to place "tags" on your posts. Is there any benefit as far as Google rankings for doing this? If not, what are they for?

#2: Would a homepage do better on Google with a blog as the front page? For example The guy that runs this site used to frequent agentsonline quite a bit, but I haven't seen him in a while so I can't ask him. I really like the layout because the blog is kind of hidden on the front page.

#3: Is it better to have the name of my target marketplace in the title of my blog post or will it be picked up in the actual post? And how often should I blog for maximum benefit?

Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom with us feeble minded salespeople.

I can't answer all of your questions (#2 has me stumped.)

With the tags, some people say that google looks at them, other's don't. Since they show up as text links next to your post, I would bet that Google just may scan them.

Think of them as descriptive chapter titles, and your blog is the book. Seeing these tags may just tell Google exactly how relevant your site is to the searches people are performing. Keep your tags tidy, descriptive, but related to what your blog is about. A lot of people list tags nilly willy and thus dilute the blog tag cloud.

This is an excellent post by SEO Guru Karen George on ActiveRain.

Actually, read all of her posts tagged SEO and/or Google. She is an excellent resource. Some SEO people who charge people to optimize their sites don't like Karen giving all this good info out for free. lol

Oh, and I have my market area in my blog title, and I often use longtail key words (very specific terms, not jus PA Real Estate) in the title of the actual post.

They say that you should post 3 to 5 times a week to ensure google crawling most often.

In reply to #1, the tags really are for organizing your posts into categories. Can the tags help in Google? It depends on how they help define the focus of your site. If the tags are all related to your core business they help but if you have tagged using words not related to your core business they can hinder. If your site is about real estate and PA - you want the tags (and your content) to reflect that. You do not want to have a lot of content about other general topics as that tells Google your site is not focused on real estate in PA and ranked accordingly.

In reply to #2 - no. It still all depends on the content and SEO. Frequently changing content has no automatic positive effect on search positions - in fact it can hurt. Frequently changing content only encourages spiders to visit more often to check out the new content. Having spiders visit more often does not mean your site will rank better. Now if changing your content encourages more people to link to you - that can help you. If people are not linking to you because of your new content it is really a waste of time. You may find this article I wrote on How Often Should A Website Be Updated interesting.

In reply to # 3 - having your keywords in both titles and content is a good thing.

Regarding how often to blog... frequent blogging on your own website encourages repeat visitors and if your lucky - links to your site. Once a week should be minimum but I personally find that hard to do. Every day would be great if you want to establish a loyal following.

Blogging is really about establishing a following which can lead to some business and perhaps links to your website. The blog format istelf is not treated as "special" by search engines and not ranked any higher than any other web page.

The tags should be in your title and in the first part of your content.

The downside to using a blog as the homepage is the content is always changing so your serps would always be changing unless you designed the homepage to have enough static content to satisfy the searches.

It is rare to see a blog at the top of the serps for competitive keywords. They are great for getting those long tail searches.

Only put your "target marketplace" in the title if it is relevant to the content. if it is put it in the title, the content and the tags. If you have a wp blog you can get "all in one SEO pack" that will let you add descriptions, which can be the same as the title.

Sign up to a bunch of blog directories and your blog will have as much juice as the big boys.

Thanks a lot guys, and gal, I really appreciate it. Bigtoe, do you have a list of blog directories? If so, could you forward them on to me? Or does that cost money, either way let me know. Thanks again.

google is your friend

I think I have seen you say that another post just recently! I guess I can't expect you guys to give me all the answers. Thanks though!

The best link out there for real estate related blogs is one of mine at real-estate-blogs.com. If you search Google for "real estate blogs" you will find it at #1. A reciprocal link is required but your link sits on a page that is PR 4 with relatively few other links. Can anyone show me where else they can get a link for their blog on a PR 4 page nowadays?

Be aware that we do check those recips from time to time and remove those that have stopped reciprocating. I removed over 100 last night so there is even better value for those listings that remain

as in benevolent dictator ?

Yup, got that one on 2 of my blogs.

Done and Done...

I have to second that real-estate-blogs.com is a very good service. I spoke to one of the owners the other day and they're still getting the bugs and such ironed out, but you can still sign up. I figure, get in on the ground floor of the PR4 link because once more agents join, I'm sure it can only go up from there

I posted about them in my AR blog and recommended them to other agents. Hey, it's free and why not increase your exposure?

In answer to #2 - I have a blog on the front page of one of my sites and honestly it performs the best...I have a lot of static keywords surrounding it so that it doesn't seem to hurt my SEO results.