Does Blogging Really Increase Your Rankings?

Today we experiemented with the phrase “vacation rentals in Ellicottville.”  We wanted to see how quickly we could get our blog posts ranked for a phrase that we’ve never attempted to rank for.  We realized that within 60 seconds, each of our posts were picked up by Google and were listed in their SERPS.  By noon, we were ranking in the mid 40s.  We even jumped up to #24 at one point.  Currently, our site is ranked in the mid 50s.  Generally, given a few house, things will shake out and we’ll have a better sense of where the “real” position lies.  We’ll look into it again tomorrow morning and maybe we’ll even do a couple more posts to see if we can boost the blog a little more.