One great and controversial question that has been in the blogosphere for a very long time now is that of whether bloggers should focus on SEO or if they should focus only on delivering quality content. Every side to this argument has a valid point but I’ll be giving you my opinion below.
Understanding the Real Value of Your Traffic and Time
How do you generate traffic to your blog every month and how much time do your invest into generating this traffic?This is a critical question you must first ask yourself when trying to decide if to focus on SEO for your blog or not. There’s no point in writing great content on your blog if it won’t be read and when trying to market your content it is only wise to think about what will deliver the best result for your time.
Investing your time in SEO might be a wise decision because it will only take little efforts from your side in terms of time and once you’ve done the necessary things you will start getting the traffic to your blog without doing anything.
I write a lot of guest posts and one thing I have noticed is that the traffic to my blog from my guest posts vary from month to month due to the number of guest posts I write in a particular month but the traffic to my blog from search engines is always increasing even if I only post half of the content I normally post in a particular month. In other words, traffic from search engines is highly consistent so it can be a great investment in terms of the time put in.
Don’t Dilute Your Content
Even though SEO is great and traffic from search engines can be one of the best forms of traffic to your blog it is very critical to ensure you don’t just write your content purely because of the SEO benefit. You can easily optimize your post titles, do some necessary on page SEO to ensure you get the right results but the most important element that will determine how fast you will rank and how long you will stay in that position is the number of quality backlinks to your articles. Each link is like a vote telling the search engines that your content is reputable and should be ranked and each vote isn’t equal. You can easily build comment backlinks to your article or do some article marketing but it isn’t the same as you getting a link back to your article from an authority domain.
Search engines don’t read your content and with a lot of improvements being consistently made everyday search engines are now favoring content that readers’ favor. Do your best to make sure your content is well written for your readers while also keeping SEO in mind.
Not All Traffic is Equal
It is also very important for you to understand that not all traffic is equal. People can easily come to your site from other sources and not take your content serious but most people coming from the search engines have a particular need they are desperate to get a solution for so this makes the search engine traffic more valuable compared to other types of traffic.
