[LocalGoogleGuru]

I disagree with that part of your other wise fine article.

text is what gets crawled

period

be verbose and you'll rank higher than a similar site (all other things being equal) that is less verbose.

How do I come to this conclusion?

Article Marketing
google that phrase

If you write an article and are lucky enough to get said article accepted in a high page rank, high traffic, trusted (by Google) authority article directory...

you will CRUSH a site that does not have those powerful backlinks pointing to it.

I'm of the opinion that a new site should NOT be written for human consumption unless and until it ranks where you want to be found in the serps

(this is a loan officer/ real estate forum so I'll decode the tech terms:

serps: in our geek speak it means Search Engine Results Pages

Google Trustfilter: that means the Google spider (aka Googlebot) has come around two or more rotations of the earth.
the first pass "you purport your site is about X" googlebot will not take your word for that, it has to looksee for itself

the second pass... googlebot see's that you still have the right combination of content and keywords and so far you've not done anything untoward like hidden text, keyword stuffing, getting trash inbound links from sleezy link farms

Now you've passed the google trust filter
do that one more time and if your competitor's website has not matched you, you'll get cached and will no longer have to prove you belong there... the other guy will have to prove he belongs in second place behind you

David Bruce Jr is a professional blogger since 2003 with over 100 blogs and Maryland Search Engine Marketing Consultant. David runs Frederick Web Promotions http://www.frederickwebpromotions.com