The best way to do that is to exercise writing valuable posts every single day. We all know that everything can be learned.

This is why I believe it’s so important to have a clear cut standards and follow through with the decisions you make.

Andy

What I notice as well is that the content in these posts is incredibly useful content to me as a visitor, but at the same time contains useful “hooks” for the search engines. Which is what I’ve really taken home from your posts. You always seem to put the visitor first by providing useful information and the search engine as an important second by making sure that your quality content contains search engine friendly words and phrases.

Also I notice from my logs that many visitors from Google are typing in the name of my company which confirms what Graham is saying, but along side that is plenty of traffic on search terms that are about the business that I am in. It is those visitors that the search engine focus is targeting, not the word of mouth visitors.

On some sites I work with where there hasn’t been any search optimisation we see only the more name targeted “word-of-mouth” searches – and correspondingly lower traffic.

My own studies show that most people find things via word of mouth and links, rather than search. But it seems as though they found us from search.

Here’s why. Observations of people using search engines show that they know where they want to go, but believe that they have to get there via Google, for instance.

So, they type in, for example “Duct Tape Marketing” into Google and you get “data” which shows you they searched for you on that phrase (or any other keyword). But they didn’t “search”; they are using the search engine to bring up your domain name at the top of the results. They know where they want to go, but their best way of getting it is to type something into Google which will get them your result near the top.

You’d be surprised to find just how many people, for instance, type in “bbc news” into Google, just to get to “news.bbc.co.uk”. Entering the “search” term into Google and then clicking on the result is quicker than typing, or mistyping, the domain name.

The result is that data which we get as web site owners from analytics is potentially misleading. People often are not “searching” they are merely using the search engine as a tool to get to where they want to go.

You’re right that if no-one finds your blog, no-one reads your blog. But come on, you’re a marketing man with tons of sensible advice on the need to use multiple strategies. I bet people come to your blog as a result of PR activities, links from other sites and so on.

I’m not saying search is worthless – but it needs to be part of the overall mix of activities to get readers to your blog. Suggesting that blogging is primarily for search encourages people to think that search is king. It isn’t; it is a valuable part of getting readers, but only a part.

With respect to being hoodwinked on search, first off I’m not making any of this stuff up based on conjecture, I’ve got tons of my own data to back it up and you’re dead wrong on the search – if no one finds your blog, no one reads your blog