This real estate site was born with a decidedly uncommercial design. Check the featured articles on the home page. None of them is a “hire me” hard sell. That is intentional. Generally I believe the level of potential reader interest is negatively correlated with the amount of selling in any marketing piece.

But marketing communications has changed greatly in the 40 years I’ve been it in, and dramatically in the past 20 years. I am referring to the science of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you want a certain audience to find your site, theoretically you need to load it up with “keywords”—terms of likely interest to that audience. Such as “sell my home in Denver.”

In this site’s featured articles, I refuse to compromise reader interest in exchange for search engine success. But this right-side blog section of the site will be different. Going forward, I intend to experiment heavily with the use and deployment of keywords in service to SEO.