I hear you. When we know where our readers are coming from, it tells us whatever we’re doing is working. If we are getting a lot of search engine traffic, SEO and keywords are working. If most of our traffic is coming from referrals, than comments or links others are posting, are working. If our traffic is direct, than our readers are typing in our URL or are coming in from a reader (I believe).

It really depends on what our blogs are about. You’re right, if we are selling something, we want traffic from all sources. Bring it on!

Will our readers participate when they get there? Check out my newest post for an answer from an expert.

Hi Chris,

SEO is tough to use without having it change your natural speaking tone. With practice it becomes easier, but it’s not essential to use SEO to get your blog found. You’re a great example of that.

You’re right, if we do listen, we can hear what our readers are asking for. It’s tough to do, but it can be done.

Although you do not use SEO, John’s post is worth bookmarking for future reference.

Hi John,

How kind of you to write such a thorough response. Not only is your SEO post helpful, but so are your additional comments. I sincerely appreciate your help and input.

What happens is bots spider your content, copy it, and then paste it onto their website. What this plugin does is let the bot copy fake content and output it on their site along with some links back to your site.

I haven’t used the plugin yet and while researching it I ran across someone we might all know who wrote an article about it.

Lorelle – here’s her article on it.

Everyone has the first step in SEO correct – always write for humans first. This is very important. SEO isn’t something you shouldn’t think about a whole lot.

Here’s my suggestion. Write just like you are now. Let it be natural. Whatever topic you’re writing about in and of itself should be SEO to some extent. Concentrate on your article’s title and a link or two. That’ll be enough and is what I mostly concentrate on when thinking SEO. It gets me quite a bit of Google traffic.

If you’re writing about “How to get people to like you,” your content will most likely naturally include keyword phrases. It shouldn’t be something you necessarily need to think long and hard about.

When proof reading, see if you can identify those keyword phrases someone might type into a search engine to find your article. It might be helpful while proof reading to think, “What would John Doe type in Google to find this article?” Chances are, if your article is focused, those words will be included already in your content (or something close).

When you identify those phrases or keyword, make them a link (that will boost them in Google’s priority ranking). Link to one of your articles or someone else’s, that’ll do just fine.

If you really want to help your SEO, match a phrase in your article’s title to what someone would type in Google. That’s probably the best thing you can do. It doesn’t have to sound robotic, it just takes a little practice.

I’m always available both here and on my site if anyone ever has a question. We’re all here to help each other grow, right?

John Hoff – eVentureBiz’s last blog post..The Continuity Of My Blog – Putting It All Together