You’re full of excited anticipation when you launch your blog. That’s natural. However, your enthusiasm can lead you astray: you forget to consider your readers and how they’ll find you.
As your blog gets more content, and as time passes, most of your readers will find you via the search engines. On my writing blog, 99 per cent of readers arrive via Google, Yahoo and MSN. That blog’s been online for three years, and in blogging, age matters, because the older your blog is, the more of its content will be indexed by the search engines, and the more traffic you’ll get.
Lorelle’s excellent post: Are You Helping the Searchers Find Your Blog? helps you to make your blog search-friendly.
Tip: don’t get too carried away with keywords etc. Remember that all keyword tools work with historical information, and have varying degrees of accuracy. Focusing too narrowly on a selection of keywords can mean that you miss out on traffic. I prefer to create my own keyword lists, from my referrer logs, and taking into account a blog’s target audience.
Look at your referrer logs, to see what terms searchers are using to find you. You may find that words you used inadvertently in a couple of posts are bringing you lots of traffic, but this may not be traffic that you want. On my writing blog, a couple of posts which gain the most traffic have nothing to do with writing, sadly, and those readers are not my target audience.
Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, traffic, content, search engines, SEO, readers
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