Why should you optimize your blog posts for search engines?

Aug 25, 2006

Simple. To get relevant traffic from search engines. When I talk of search engine optimization I don’t mean just focus on the search engine traffic and forget about your readers. For your blogging, that’ll be suicidal; your blogging is only as good as how many people regularly read your blog posts. By manipulatively optimizing your blog posts to attract traffic you can bring them to your blog easily, but you cannot make them stay or make them click on your link again.

Relevant traffic is good if you earn advertising revenue through your blog, and relevant traffic is good if you want to attract more and more people and consequently promote your own business. You can get decent traffic from your links on other websites and blogs and by constant interactions at other blogs and forums (where you can “legitimately” leave your links) but the cream of your traffic comes from search engines. Since searchers are looking for a specific topic/term, they more often than not directly land on the right place without first going to the main page and then clicking/finding the right post. So your search engine traffic automatically enhances the relevancy of your visitors.