SEO is ...

Dead?

On page optimization matters very little anymore.

Alive?

Optimization has moved into link optimization whereby your inbound  links are what will get your pages found/indexed by the engines. And what passes on value to your pages.

No links and your gorgeous website or blog are dust in the digital wind.

Many in this blog community know that SEO can cause traffic. Because they get it from this site. It saves the pain of creating massive links on your own when you can get it from here. You get on the front page and the link value from activerain.com passes down into your blog. Others chat up your blog and you have links from all over the community.

Its not enough in big markets, but it does help and it saves on time.

How Many Eggs and In How Many Baskets?

Many guerillas know this and take advantage of this ability to get traffic from portal communities. But I have warned many times, "Consider what is the value of free".

1.What does the owner of the portal get out of you posting? No one is that charitable.Ads or Offers are inevitable.
2. What happens as in the case of Squidoo when Google comes along and "slaps" the entire network? If your only "blog" was on Squidoo, you were possibly put out of business.

Certainly a network such as this has its value, but again free is free.  Call it Karma or the the Google god. But the engines know what can happen with free anything. Just look at what happened with their own free blogging at Blogster.

Web 2.0 to the hypsters is about socialization and human created content. To Internet Marketers, it is another link back to their paid for place of doing business. Perhaps you noticed the link above? It fits within the context of this post. But many are not as kind to the network when they post.

But this network is pretty responsible. However, a logic, understanding and compassion is not always go hand in hand with the cold realities of a search engine algorithm.