Anyone starting a new blog faces a significant hurdle. Unless you are writing for a well established web site such as LesTout your search engine traffic potential will be very low. It takes long term consistent posting and good search engine optimization (SEO) skills to bring a blog or web site from the fiftieth page of search results up to the first. Chances are that during the first three to six months of posting to your blog you will receive little if any appreciable traffic. At first your site and posts will be sandboxed and listed only sparingly in the search results. Over time the number of hits from the search engines may or may not improve. This may not mean that what you are writing is bad, but it may signal that the way you are writing it is not SE optimized enough to trigger the search engines to list the page in the search results.
Here are a few suggestions to think about that will help you improve your standing with Google and other search engines:
First, most beginning bloggers don't like to have to think about things like search engine optimization of their posts, and instead try to rely on users checking their RSS feeds or learning of their site by word of mouth. Unfortunately most people will not actively go out and read blog posts on a regular basis unless they have a pressing desire or need to do so. A large chunk of Internet users do not even know about RSS feeds for blogs and fewer still will bother to check individual sites for new material. This means that the majority of people visiting your blog will come from the search engines.
Because of this If you want to get more people reading your posts, think about focusing on one or two keyword phrases in each of your posts that you might use when searching Google to find the information that you are writing about in that blog post. Work those keyword phrases into your article fairly liberally without sounding repetitive. Other things like using bold subheadings and anchored links help out a lot as well. Read up on the web about Search Engine Optimization of articles and you will discover that it is a lot different than writing for a paper publication.
Link out to other sites or other pages on your site that provide the user (and Google) with more info on the topic. People new to blogging often have the incorrect assumption that linking to other people's sites takes people away from their posts but in truth linking to respected sources for additional information is essential to get Google and other search engines to send them to you in the first place. When I first started writing for the web I never included links and those articles have never performed nearly as good as those that I did link from.
In general, have fun writing your blog but also try to take these basic suggestions into account while you write them. Be sure that you know what you are trying to get out of your blog and how you define your measure of success with your writings. Above all, keep going for several months before getting discouraged with your viewership. Those who persevere over the long term and fill a needed niche in content are often the most successful bloggers.
