There is no SEO/ key word/ blog directory magic bullet

[Melody]

Please stop thinking that you are going to get 1000 visitors a day because you've got a search engine optimized website.

CONTENT drives traffic. You can be oblivious to SEO, PR, keywords, and create a great blog if you have content.

People on this blog talk until they are blue in the face about SEO. Put that energy into well-written, unique, informative content.

The fact of the matter is that most people don't want to hear the hard truth that they don't have something totally unique, or they don't write well, or that their content is boring. I am so sorry, but that _might_ be true for you. Since it's too hard to hear that and offends people to consider that their content isn't working, they would rather blame lack of traffic on search engine optimization.

Yes you do have to worry about marketing your blog, but you don't have to worry about it to the level of obsession that goes on in this site, and you can't game a blog into success.

[ChickenFreak]

Yes. Yes. Also, yes.

A blog is, at the core, about _people reading content_. People. Not search engines.

And people come to read content. Good content. Great content. Not a couple of sloppily typed or scraped paragraphs hurriedly inserted into the blog in between choosing SEO keywords and auto-following another hundred people on Twitter.

You know all those great backlinks that you want, the ones from authoritative sites, the ones from sites that Google respects? Important, real sites in a niche don't link to bad blogs. And blogs that are designed to appeal to the search engines rather than to people _are_ bad blogs.

[DrWriteBrain]

I have to play devil's advocate here. I definitely see where you're coming from; seo has become an obsession of mine of late. The only point that I would argue is that people are afraid of the work. In my limited experience, I've found that it's really not hard work to do keyword research and make sure they're properly placed. I get that. The problem I believe most people have is not the investment in sweat equity, but rather time. Having your site (not individual posts) ranked in the search engines can take a loooong time and that scares the hell out of some people. That's a big reason why this forum has a gazillion people on it; they're looking for another avenue to drive in traffic. Here's where we are back in agreement: once you have the traffic, then what? If you don't have interesting content, you're just spinning your wheels.

[Melody]

Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO

^ I would suggest that before you bank on SEO to at least give a read through that blog article.

[DrWriteBrain]

Just read it...it does sort of put things in perspective, but then it still isn't helping me to understand how to best leverage those properties. I know they say interact and yada yada yada, but thus far it hasn't yielded much in the way of results....

[daveg]

I agree that content is king. No doubt about it. At the same time though, if you don't optimize, then you are selling yourself short. If you write great content and currently get 1000 visitors per month without any SEO....then you could get many times that if you were properly optimized.

Both SEO and great content are necessary.

[Chrisg]

Surely it depends on what you perceive as being more important? For me search engines like SEO whilst visitors want content.

[Gemmacat]

I believe in writing for people. And I think that truly is the future of the internet. People share content that they like with others and people find sites they trust through those channels.
Brands matter more than nr. 1 in a search engine, because what people trust is the opinion of their friends and family.

[ishan]

Couldn't agree more. It's fun and also sad to see people running after magic bullets and spending money on SEO and other things instead of working on getting loyal readers.