One of the most popular topics when it comes to blogging is personal relationships and networking, so I hope I don’t tread of too many toes with this post but I think a lot of bloggers are letting their ego’s get the better of them – and it is costing them!
Now, I am not saying that networking isn’t worthwhile – because it is! And when it comes to personal relationships, they can be absolute gold!
What worries me is that bloggers are more worried about their thousands of Twitter followers (who probably never read their tweets) and comment counts, than they are with quality traffic that will drive profit.
SEO Has A Stigma With Bloggers
Blogging is about passion and communication, and SEO is seen as impersonal and detracting from the message they are trying to convey. It doesn’t have to be that way and I want to look at 3 reasons you need to give some focus to the search engines.
3 Reasons To Focus On SEO
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SEO Traffic Is Passive Traffic
The thing I love about the traffic that I receive from search engines is that I don’t have to do anything to keep it coming. I have a niche blog that I haven’t posted to or promoted for months – yet it consistently receives 70-100 visits a day. This means that it leaves me time to duplicate my efforts instead of focusing on keeping the traffic to my site flowing.
How much would your blogging experience improve if you didn’t need to work so hard to get visitors to your blog? I think you would enjoy it a lot more!
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SEO Traffic Brings Targeted Traffic
Another great thing is your ability to target viewers based on what they are looking for at that very moment. The problem I have with relying on social traffic is that your subscribers and Twitter followers are reading your posts because they like you and your writing. I would bet that 90+% of your readers are not looking for the content that you are publishing -when you publish it. But with search engine optimization you can be right their for them when you content is ready to answer their questions.
Are you looking to entertain your readers or to solve their problems and answer their questions?
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SEO Traffic Is Ready To Spend Money
And since the majority of people visit the search engines to find answers to their questions – if you target the right keywords they will most likely arrive at your blog with the wallets out ready to pay for the answer to their problems!
I have found from personal experience that when I make an affiliate commission, it is NOT from the initial flood of social traffic. It will usually come from well place keywords and systematic optimization that has allowed me to get targeted search traffic.
Now I am not trying to tell you that we all have to become automated, emotionless bloggers that solely care about gaining traffic from search engines at the sake of our readers!
Instead I want to encourage you to find a happy medium.
Where you are:
- Finding great keywords for your articles and working them in so that they fit fluently into your content.
- Taking advantage of cheap link building strategies and internal linking to increase your ranking.
- Make sure your articles are always providing quality to your readers.
I think that as bloggers we can find that balance where our content is pure to our readers and still put emphasis on SEO.