You write great stuff. You update your blog daily. Still at the end of the day nobody seems to come to your site. Of course your family and friends pop in for a visit. Why is your overall traffic so low? The underlying issue is most likely the search engine optimization within the articles on your blog. Is search engine optimization really that important on a blog? I would have to argue yes. Please allow me to try to prove my point.
Organic search engine optimization is time consuming
By the time you start to see results from organic SEO you will have snapped at the lack of traffic. I tried starting a blog before straight from the bottom without placing any emphasis on SEO. After about a year my traffic was stagnant. I was at the point where I maxed out at 300 views a day. Not exactly a great amount of traffic if you plan to live off your blog income. SEO will allow you to write great articles that will bring in traffic from Google and other search engine users that are researching specific topics.
Organic keywords and organic search optimization do come with time but they take much longer to expand your daily traffic. Sure there are the blog success stories of a small blog that grew from 60 subscribers to 60,000 in less than a year or so (Zen Habits), but with the advent of so many new excellent blogs this is becoming increasingly difficult. Every day a new blog emerges (this blog for example) and it starts to cut into your traffic. The sad reality is that generally the more SEO articles will make it to the top of Google’s search engine.
Traffic generated from links is often not suffice
Your personal finance blog may get a link from Get Rich Slowly, The Simple Dollar, or The Consumerist, and the link will generated lots of traffic. You will likely get at least a couple of hundred click throughs and a few new subscribers. Great! The problem is- how many of these high quality links will you get? You can’t solely rely on links from A list bloggers as your bread and butter for blog traffic. Your articles need to be optimized for search engines so that you have a steady influx of traffic. Quick traffic bursts are a pleasant surprise but steady growth is the key to long term traffic success (in my opinion).
Regular readers will not visit your blog.
What a stupid statement- regular readers will not visit my blog. How does that make sense? The people that truly love your blog will subscribe via email or RSS feed and chances are they will stop actually visiting your blog.
My most loyal readers never actually go on the site because they have articles delivered straight to their email inbox. So you can technically have 1000 subscribers and 200 daily blog views because your loyal readers are simply not accessing your site. So if regular readers are not viewing your blog then that means you need to find new readers. The best way to do this would be to perform some SEO on your articles so that more eye balls are on them.
Those are just my thoughts on the importance of search engine optimization on a blog.
