Does SEO Matter if you have a Niche Blog

[workinghard]

Hi, I have a reflective blog and I have been looking at my google numbers. I get very little traffic from Google. Most of my traffic comes from Blog forums. So does it matter if I Tweak my blog for SEO since my blog is really a niche blog? Or should I keep trying to refine the blog? Thanks in advance

[ChickenFreak]

I'm far too lazy to do anything significant about SEO, like figuring out exactly where the search strings are most appropriately placed, or spending a lot of time hunting for likely strings.

But I do at least occasionally pause to consider how I'd search Google for the material in my post, and add those search strings to the post or the tags.

For example, "fragrance review" and "perfume review" and "cologne review" are frequent search terms, so I slap both "fragrance review" and whichever of the other two are most appropriate, in my post tags. But I don't put those exact phrases in the post, because there's usually no graceful place to put it in the writing, and I'm not willing to make the writing awkward.

As another example, when I posted about a play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I made sure that "Oregon Shakespeare Festival" _and_ "OSF" _and_ "Ashland" were in the post. I'd probably have searched on "osf ashland hamlet" if I were looking for that subject, so I wanted my post to be a hit for that search. And in that case, it wasn't awkward to get them into the text.

Your metaphor, "gifts from the journey", is probably not serving you in search engines, because it's not a terribly common metaphor. So you get points for creativity, but creativity is heard to search for. So it wouldn't hurt to have just a little bit of search engine food to help lead people to your blog.

You could figure out what search strings would be used by someone searching for a blog like yours, and get them in there somewhere - in the introductory material or the tags if they just don't fit in the text itself. I don't know what those strings would be - "philosophy"? "musings"? "essays"? "life journey"? "self improvement"? "self discovery"?

Tucking some of those phrases in couldn't hurt as long as it's done gracefully, and it might help.

[Inspirational Blogger]

Well, SEO definitely matters.

Maybe the reason you say that you get NO traffic from google is because you don't know basic SEO? Things like meta descriptions, unique titles, and such are very easy to implement and are by no means only useful for SEO.

There's no need to go overboard and edit everything, but if you read a good article on SEO and then implement some of it youll probably look back months down the road and be glad you did.

[workinghard]

Hi Inspirational I get about11% of traffic from Goggle. I get the larger percentage from blog forums, some direct direct but my lowest traffic level is goggle. So it does not seem to matter in my niche with goggle since I get so little traffic from that SEO. I think that if my blog was more commercial then it would matter more.

[Melody]

Well I literally have been taking the exact same approach as chicken_freak, not worrying about SEO.

My blog is 6 months old and right now out of my total unique daily visitors, about 100 of them come from some sort of organic google search. Over the 6 months I have seen definite steady slow growth. That's fine by me.

Be patient.

[workinghard]

Thanks Melody, I was wondering if my expectations were a little too high. I have seen a lot of posts and they all seem to worry about SEO, when so little of my traffic really goes from the SEO. Thought I was missing out on something.

[sub001]

If you don't care about traffic from Google, you don't need to worry about SEO.

If most of your current traffic comes from forums, it tells me your traffic levels are very low. If true, it's not a good basis for decision making.

Most good sites I know receive 50-90% of their traffic from Google alone. I am talking about sites getting 100's and 1,000's of unique visitors per day.

[ChickenFreak]

Workinghard, I'm not sure if you saw my post. I do think that it would be worthwhile to figure out some of the phrases that people might use to find sites like yours, and tuck them in somewhere. As I said, your metaphor is a creative one, but it's not one that people are likely to search on.

[workinghard]

Well sub001, you are right I don't get 100's or 1,000 a day. I probably would get scared if that happened. My plan is just to slowly build my site so that I can handle the traffic. Thanks Chicken I did see you posting, part of my problem is that I don't really understand how to use google in developing traffic site. I did get a book, blogging for dummines and it mentions SEO's in the book. Maybe I will go back and read that chapter again.

Well with my low traffic site I will keep prodding on Thanks for all of the comments and ideas. Be well

[sequencehosting]

SEO certainly is very important. If you plan to grow in the future why not work on SEO now? I think it would be a good idea to get the on-page SEO out of the way early on. Don't worry though it's not as scary as it seems Looking at your blog it seems like you have done a good job with your on-page SEO (page title, meta description, meta tags). A couple of suggestions would be to incorporate heading tags and inbound links.

Heading tags are very important for on page SEO. You can learn more about them here:

Html Head Tag SEO Tips Search Engine Optimization

Internal links (I don't know the exact term) are also very important. This means linking pages inside of your blog. For example if you had a paragraph with keywords relevant to another post you have made you could create a link from those keywords to the relevant post on your blog. One of the best examples of this is Wikipedia. Wikipedia links many keywords from their articles to other. This could be why they rank high for everything.

I would highly recommend using Wordpress as many plugins are available to help you with the SEO side of things.

Regards,
Jack