How Important Is SEO For Your Blog?

I was recently putting together a lesson for the final class in the Blog Traffic School course. This lesson is part of what I call the “advanced” materials – topics focused on taking your blog beyond the 1000 daily readers we aim for in Blog Traffic School, which are discussed in the concluding sections of the course. Essentially everything in Blog Traffic School can be used to grow your blog beyond 1000 readers, but for this particular lesson I wanted to focus on the things I have found that really brought my blog above the 1000 daily visitors mark and into the 2000+ daily readers milestone.

As I sat back and thought about it I realized there was one very powerful traffic source, one that many bloggers don’t think about too much, which accounted for a lot of my traffic once my blog had matured – the search engines. I say it had to “mature” for a reason, you see my blog received barely any search traffic for at least the first 4-6 months of its life. I had purchased a new domain name (yarodev.wpengine.com) for it and while it was very easy to get my blog at least listed in the search engines, quite a few things had to happen before I started ranking well.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an area that most bloggers will never get into in any real depth. At the highest level, very technical-minded people are testing and tracking things to optimize search rankings for their websites and blogs. These people use controlled tests, playing with all the variables that make up a website – the words, code, links and so forth. Once they have results the rest of us can study their findings and apply the latest “theories” as tests for our own search engine rankings. Some things work well, some don’t.

In a lot of ways, a search engine optimization is an art form. It has fundamental principles which make you feel like it is a science – and a lot of people working in SEO will tell you it is and they will purport to have complete control over search engine results – but they would be lying. In reality, everyone who works in SEO is guessing. Yes, they have some very sound principles to work from but ultimately no direct control over the deciding factors – the search engine algorithms, which is as it should be or the system could be corrupted by those in power.

Why Does SEO Matter?

So what does all this have to do with your blog? As I stated once my blog had matured and grown past its first birthday I noticed that my articles started to show up in the first page of search engine results for some pretty relevant terms for my blog’s niche. While they don’t individually provide a lot of traffic, collectively it is a steady stream of new visitors – and this is the key – these are mostly new visitors.

Search engine traffic serves to bring in new visitors to your blog. Now I of course thoroughly recommend you work on building a loyal readership for your blog, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want new visitors coming in as well. Attracting new visitors is how your blog grows, and converting those new visitors into regular readers is the process you should be aiming to complete.

How To Get More Search Traffic To Your Blog

That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it! Okay, first up if you know nothing about search engine optimization and you have time to really get your teeth into it, read this article series I wrote – The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques.

In that article I have collected the most relevant things you can do to help your blog’s SEO, however, there is a lot to do and you may not be up for the task. If you don’t have the time or energy for in-depth SEO then here is my advice for you –

Focus your energies on one thing – get links from authority sites.

What are authority sites? They are websites that have a lot of links from other authority sites! Aha – catch 22 you say, and yes in a way it doesn’t sound fair does it. Authority sites are websites, and blogs are included, which the search engines consider being authoritative sources of information. Generally, if the site has lots of traffic, links from other authority sites and people doing searches keep finding the answers they want from these sites, you have the formula for authority status. It’s a hard thing to pinpoint but virtually every niche online has a handful of authority sites. Right now I bet every website you visit on a daily basis (perhaps besides your own) is an authority site for its niche.

When authority sites link to your site then your site gets some of that “authority” juice. It’s that juice that will help your blog climb higher in the rankings.

For the sake of clarification I want to state that your blog’s search engine ranking is dependent on a lot of variables and just focusing on authority, links is only part of the picture, but in my opinion it is the most crucial and the most difficult to accomplish. To get a link from an authority site, or preferably lots of them, and from many different authority sites, you really need to be doing spectacular things or saying spectacular things or helping people in spectacular ways or have a spectacular PR person working for you. It’s by no means easy and it doesn’t (nor should it) happen overnight. This is something that you build up to overtime.

So essentially, once again my advice to you regarding your blog’s search engine rankings is to become spectacular.