I couldn’t help but wade into this topic at the USM blog. I’d love your feedback in public or private. Thanks for the great topic.

Perhaps.

The motivation for the post? It’s not that there is a problem with bloggers gone wild chasing tail. I never said it was a problem, big or small, nor that long tail is a worthless strategy (it is a niche strategy that has application, especially if you have a niche), but only that I agree with Mary as to its dearth of attracting transactional visitors, generally speaking, compared to keywords bringing more TVs.

Nor was the motivation to create a controversy. I am not aware that one exists.

The motivation was to make a few points and invite conversation (which I thank you, and others, for providing):

1. the most valuable visitor to a RE blog is a person wanting to transact business now and that a RE blog for business should focus on attracting those visitors. In essence, the best blog is the best real estate website, with a conversation element added for new content.

2. blogging is a numbers game but the numbers that count for the most business come from transactional visitors– not the visitors that come to see you bash a fellow Realtor. The more transactional visitors , the more conversions, the more conversions, the more trips to the bank.

3. assuming you accept the Pareto Distribution, by definition, ranking higher in the search engines for head/neck keywords will bring much more TV traffic than long tail keywords (so maybe I was stating the obvious?).

I also said I believe the entire long tail is only 20% of the total market. (and no one wanted to talk about that– dang)

4. the long tail strategy (to get at this 20%) works best if (a) you can cover the entire tail in your market — that was the point of the Amazon/Netflix study. (one way to cover it may be to have a category for each neighborhood and you regularly write on each neighborhood from a buyer or seller perspective) or (b) you do business in a niche (I used the example of Earth homes) or (c) your TV comes via long tail hits (if a hot new building goes up in your market, its all over the local news and there’s a lot of buzz– you ought to be buzzing along too from a buyer/seller perspective)

RE your comment: “When I said rich content covers both I was assuming the best SEO practices, not saying that certain techniques to get good placement aren’t important.
If there are bloggers out there going after only for the long tail, I assume they are using the best techniques to get good placement with longtail results.”

Here we definitely agree: Best SEO IS important, regardless of any tail talk. But..I don’t assume folks use best SEO practices and, in the end, that’s what this may be all about. The fact that you or I understand something helps in search engine placement does not mean everyone else does (I’m sure you agree). So I put information out there that may help someone who may not know. Heck, I’m still learning.

The folks that already know how to row the blog boat, like Todd or Ann, or you, don’t need my opinion to make money from their blogs. But all are not as fortunate.

As always, thanks for stopping by Mike.

Let’s assume that certain techniques are widely known to improve search results.

That brings us to what type of results the blogger is looking for.

Mary seems to say that some agents are looking only for long tail results — they “chase” the long tail.

I’m wondering if there really are a lot of bloggers who “chase” the long tail at the expense of short tail as a strategy.

If there are a lot of bloggers doing this then fine, the warning to not do it makes sense.

But if, as I suspect, there aren’t many agents who claim that the best strategy is to the chase the long tail and not worry about the short tail, then Mary’s blog appears to be creating a problem where there isn’t one.

When I said rich content covers both I was assuming the best SEO practices, not saying that certain techniques to get good placement aren’t important.

If there are bloggers out there going after only for the long tail, I assume they are using the best techniques to get good placement with longtail results.

So all the warnings about flash, titles, first paragraphs, metatags and all that are not pertinent to what I was wondering. I understand all that — what i don’t understand is the motivation for the post — are there a lot of agents focusing only on long tail?

I don’t think Mary’s point was that bloggers are utilizing the best SEO practices — her point was the target of the blogger’s efforts, long tail or short tail.