Blogs as Neighborhoods or Virtual Communities?

How do possible neighbors find your house?
Since I will be advertising a business on line I have looked at some of the search engines and some aspects of getting our name higher on a google search. I think in many ways you are doing just what needs to be done. You have lots of good outgoing links and an increasing number of blogs are linking to you, with a drop of one this week to 55. From the sounds of it you are spreading your name around by word of mouth and posting on other blogs.
One suggestion is to write some Meta Tags as in: (meta name="keywords" content="Pacific NW Portal, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Northwest Progressive Institute, Puget Sound, Seattle, Portland, Boise, Spokane, Tacoma, Eugene, Bellevue, Redmond, Poctalleo, HorsesAss.org, Red State Rebel, Blue Oregon, Basie, Scott Jensen's Blog, From Red to White then Blue, Evergreen Politics, Pacific Views, RoguePundit, 43rd State Blues, BrightMind") into your code. In my informal survey, it looked as if more from the right were using meta tags. A couple of studies of links and left-right divide are at Crooked Timber and hp. But more importantly about.com has a good overview of raising your rank on Google and here is more detailed explanation at Page Rank Explained. And then to check page rank at google-check page rank but ranking without a keyword or phrase does not make sense so Rocket Rank is better or try Goya-rank for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Alsoalso ranked #1 (Rocket Rank) for the phrase “progressive-conservative meeting of the political minds” in 6 out of 10 search engines with the remainder resulting in no ranking. And notable is Explode your blog traffic.
Here is an interesting survey of blog readers at Blogads.
While I hope this missive is insightful, I still see problems with trying to find a blog based on keywords or directories. Even if your rank is high based on the phrase used earlier how many will type this into a search engine? One problem I encounter on a frequent basis is that my search will not go to the permalink but to an archive or to the front page. Thusly you will get results that pick key words from multiple posts and not a single post. Directories also have a tough time getting the weblogs into a coherent taxonomy with the most distinguished one being DMOZ.



I kept getting rejected for Comment Spam. I tried it on kos and it rejected it for the meta tag example. I see now it failed here also. "One suggestion is to write some Meta Tags as in: (meta name="(b)keywords(/b)" content="Pacific NW Portal, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Northwest Progressive Institute, Puget Sound, Seattle, Portland, Boise, Spokane, Tacoma, Eugene, Bellevue, Redmond, Poctalleo, HorsesAss.org, Red State Rebel, Blue Oregon, Basie, Scott Jensen's Blog, From Red to White then Blue, Evergreen Politics, Pacific Views, RoguePundit, 43rd State Blues, BrightMind"> into your code. Using() instead of <>."
Zap, thank you for your comments and yes maybe I am making too much of community into weblogs. As far as message boards I always felt it was way too random. One thought to the next never had any cohesiveness and often tended to be one sided conversations. Even now I avoid open threads at kos. One example that does come to mind in blogs helping to bring people and communities together is the family blog or the local blog.
I don’t want to give the impression of directing a person to the exact spot to go to but give a choice based on a ranking system of a persons wants and desires with as many choices as they desire. Again, thank you for your time and opening up this thread. I will have some other thoughts latter, if that is ok. Lastly your comment box seems way to small especially when using links.

9-15-05:
I found a blog ranking site BlogStreet that also refers to groups of blogs as Neighborhoods or Visual Neighborhoods. I couldn't get it to work on my blog, but look very interesting.