People who start a blog usually have one thing in common, they are impatiently waiting for their first visitors to arrive at their new site, and they crave the attention of the crowds. Many bloggers have confessed over their blog pages about their hopes for traffic and media exposure, having their thoughts and posts responded to and republished all over the internet. Even an inexperienced person will feel the excitement of publishing a new post on a blog, and would be disappointed to learn that no one read his or her thoughts by the end of the first day.
A few years ago the web 2.0 revolution was on its way, blogs became one of the easiest and most popular way for many to share their thoughts and ideas with the world, blogs were many times referred to as your own private magazine on the net, only no one knew that much of those blogs will not be visited by anyone, and will serve as personal diaries of those who write them. The fact that so many people started having blogs created vast competition for the topics that were covered in those pages, from radio controlled helicopters to Italian cooking tips bloggers were creating a dense forest of related pages that confused both visitors and search engines robots.
The direct result of the wild expansion of blogs was that search engines started being suspicious about blogs in general, and after a short love affair with blogs search engines wanted to see more commitment from these easy to set up internet pages and their publishers. Today blogs enjoy some of the fruits of that old love affair with the search engines, but are still under close inspection.
The great advantage that blogs offer simple users is the easy set up and the ability to post text or photos (or both) with a few clicks of a button, without any serious understanding or knowledge of code or scripts, the blogs are set on huge networks that enjoy strong linking and many users, the template on which the blogs are published is very appealing to the search engine robots, and the RSS delivers what it promises, really simple syndication for any blog out there.
There are a few things every blogger out there should know and do, these will push and promote the pages of his blog, make a semantic connection between the last post and the ideas it addressed and make it possible and easy for other people to find that text and read it. Once a post is written a blogger needs to insert the keywords and tag the written message, video or photos with the appropriate words it refers to, if this is not done the post is much harder for the robots to package into a few terms. A short description of the post or article, video or photos in the post will make the summary available to searchers without accessing the page, thus contributing to the user experience on the blog. Forget to add a descriptive line and your indexed page will not have much to offer a person browsing the terms you entered as tags, and will have no incentive to visit the blog.
Once posted the blog needs to be pinged, you can search the net for a pinging service that will inform many other sites of your blog and its fresh post, sending out a ping is probably the most important thing a blogger needs to do in search engine optimization terms, if a post is not pinged is stands a much lower chance of attracting any potential readers, and even for a non commercial and personal blog this "light promotion" is needed, after all why writer and post it if no one reads it?