I used to do search engine optimization (SEO) marketing for a living, and just recently started up consulting again. Not, as I always point out right up front, the URL misdirection and link spam kind. No. The kind where you create human-readable content geared towards providing the information your audience is looking for.

I got started in 2001, worked at it part-time to pay for my first couple years of undergrad, and quit in 2005 to go back to school full time. I started blogging in 2002, and at some point, I realized that all the hard-won markers of success for my clients' web sites came to me easily on my own blog, even if it wasn't getting blogger A List traffic. No one can ever tell me that there isn't value in what we do, even if few of us get paid for it.

In a way, this post has been six and a bit years in the writing. (Has it really been that long? Oh. Well.) I wasn't sure if there'd be an audience for this topic in the political blogosphere before, but considering the frustration I've been hearing from so many bloggers about what seems to be a plateau in traffic that once grew with regularity, we may have reached the limits of natural audience growth. So maybe it's time for something more.

Search Engine Optimization in a Nutshell

Here's your one paragraph SEO tutorial: Write new pages for your website. Do it often; weekly at least, daily or several times daily at best. Make it interesting and relevant. Use descriptive titles and headings so that if someone sees your page in a search, they'll know what they're getting. Did I mention that you need to write regularly?

There's other stuff, but you'd be surprised how easy it is to get people to do that other stuff (getting listed in directories, optimizing the meta tags on key pages, using keywords in URLs, etc.) as opposed to doing the writing, which is the most effective and important part. The easy tech fix is the soft sell, even if it doesn't come close to being enough.

The Non-Secrets of Search and Web Traffic

It's so much easier to get people to invest in graphic design than writing, even though sites like Drudge and Eschaton prove that visitors just don't care all that much about how fancy the site looks. I mean, good graphics are nice, but you sure can get by without them. People don't come back to visit sites every day because of their superior graphic design -- even sites like Cute Overload and the LOLcats mecca, I Can Haz Cheezburger, rely on the steady addition of new content as opposed to the superiority of their static site design.

There are whole forums, blogs, books and tutorials dedicated to getting web marketing professionals a leg up on understanding the psychology of search engines so their site can move up a peg in page rank or get a higher listing for a desirable search keyword.

And then, a couple years ago there was a clamor of complaint that blogs, blogs!, were clogging up all the search results. Bastiches. Google had to take special steps to downgrade certain top blog sites, like the DailyKos, in their results, because they performed so well in search that they were coming up high in the rankings across a wide variety of issues. Which was totally unfair to all the people who'd paid a lot of money for their websites. Obviously.

Blogs work for search because, without initial intent, they're the essence of what a search engine wants to point to. Why? Because they're the essence of what people want to visit, and search engines make their living by giving people what they want on the web. Simple, right?

Done well, a blog demonstrates relevance through regularly updated and human-readable content, being embedded within a community of interlinking websites, and talking about subjects of interest using the sorts of words and phrases that a search engine visitor might type into Google or MSN to find them. Never mind, for now, the algorithms used to identify these things; that's the heart of search, right there. Though if you don't believe me, you could always listen to marketing guru, Seth Godin.

There're no deep secrets to search engine marketing and optimization. There's just a lot of writing involved.

The Next Level of Search Marketing

If you're a blogger, you're 95% there already. You could probably, with a little brush up and light study on blog promotion, teach a class in online marketing that would blow many marketing professionals out of the water. Not because that's what you started out to do, but because you've been doing it already, know it or not. The good social marketing people sure know it, though, because what they tell their corporate clients is to watch what the bloggers are doing.

And you may be reading this wondering why, if this is the case, your blog isn't all that well trafficked.

Well, let me preface what follows by saying that I'm not telling you how to write your blog, which I realize is the cardinal sin of blogging. These are just suggestions as to how you might boost your traffic without the benefit of a link from one of the big bloggers. And face it, even if you got a front page nod from the Great Orange Satan, it'd be a transitory boost that'd be gone by the next day. So ...

What's in a title: Everything. If you aren't Atrios, chances are you're better off setting up whatever blog software you use so that individual entries show up on their own page with the entry title replicated in the page heading. That page heading is the title that shows up in a search as the page name, and it's the first and most important thing a search visitor notices when deciding which link to click. Search engines also rate page titles highly when they're measuring relevance, so they affect your rankings.

Look up to the left of your browser, the very top of the browser bar, and whatever appears there is the search entry title of the page you're reading.

Does it tell you anything useful or interesting about the content? Is it appealing? Does it contain any of the words someone might use to find what you've written about? Would you click on it if you saw it in a search result page? This isn't to say that you can't write obscure or jokey titles, but if you're writing something you really want people to find later, think carefully about your entry title.

Write what you know: This classic piece of advice for fiction writers is just as relevant to blogging and search marketing.

What do you do locally? What do you think about it? Do you have any favorite hobbies? There are sites on the internet dedicated to every interest any person has ever had. And there are people looking for them. Is that traffic you want to leave on the table?

Granted, you want to write a serious topical blog. Good. But people have a limited threshold for plowing through long treatises, and I bet you have a limited threshold for writing them. If you can fit it within the concept and character of your site, mix it up a little. Maybe someone will show up for your review of Madison, WI's, excellent (no joke!) Wah Kee Noodle House, and come back now and again for your coverage of the state legislature.

The long tail of local search is all the rage for business. People are using search, often enabled by their wireless handsets, more and more frequently to find information about things near where they live. Which means, by definition, near where you live.

Go Wireless: This could be tricky. After all, what do you know, or want to know, about WML? Maybe a lot, there are a lot of internet professionals in the blog ranks. But you don't have to know much about it at all for your site to be wireless tolerant.

In fact, the easiest thing you can do to make your site more compatible with the display on my standard-issue crackberry is also something that can boost your search rankings -- put all your navigation on the right hand side of the page.

It takes for bleeping ever to scroll past the typical blog menu bar on the typical wireless handheld. My. God. The thumb, it begs for mercy. I want to get to the text, the meat, but each time the page loads, I'm back to needing to deal with the menu.

This is because of the way a web page is written and read by any browser. Whatever is in the left hand column is at the top of the page of code that's being displayed, and each main column from left to right is successively lower. Put your entries on the left and you put them at the top of the page for wireless devices that don't display tables properly, which is most of them. This makes your site tolerable for wireless visitors, and since so few sites are, you might get bookmarked for return if the first experience is pleasant.

And I said this works for boosting search rank, because left-top to right-bottom is how spiders read pages, too. Spiders are the programs that crawl the web for Google, MSN, and all the others, patiently cataloging pages and following links. Things at the top of the page, which is to also say 'what displays in the left column', affect search rank more than what's lower down, or to the right.

Do Some Research: There are a ton of free resources for learning about search engine optimization. Just, you know, search for them. Really. Like I said, this is pretty simple stuff, especially if you have the writing part down.

The proliferation of social bookmarking sites also offer a free resource for figuring out what people are looking for. A lot of people go primarily to a site like Digg or Reddit and surf whatever gets thrown to the top, so it's their main portal to the web, and it could be their portal to your site. But just like writing within a blog community, there are community standards of taste and decorum that you don't want to violate and be branded a spammer or troll.

If you want to participate at one of these bookmarking sites (in all your spare time, I know, I so know,) don't just recommend your own work, really use it to share the full range of things you enjoy. This is also one of the few things blog readers can do to promote their favorite sites effectively, and spread the voices of their favorite authors. A reputation economy functions best when predicated on preemptive acts of goodwill.

Then, and you knew this was coming, there are the paid information sources. Though they're not generally prohibitively expensive, so if you think you might benefit from these last, my favorites, think about it. They're good value for the money.

Wordtracker - This paid database will let you discover what exact phrases people are typing into search engines, how often, how much competition there is for the phrase (you're sometimes better off going with a low frequency phrase that's got less competition), and suggest a host of related keywords. This very precise marketing data is yours to have for $329/yr, $59/mo, or $30/wk.

If you pull in that much from advertising off your site, or think you might be able to, Wordtracker data could really pay dividends. And if you make really good use of a one week subscription, you might not need to worry about it for another year.

Webmaster World - This is a news feed and forum site for people who make a living managing websites, exactly as the name suggests. Everything you want to know about the topic has been covered somewhere on this site. Parts of the site are free, but if you want to get into the good search marketing forums, you have to subscribe. It's $149/yr, $89/6 mos.

The up-to-the-minute discussions of what works and what doesn't are as valuable as a book on the topic. When Google changes a ranking algorithm and people notice changes, they're right there talking about it.

Lastly ...

There isn't a PR firm for blogging. No one is selling our message to the larger public, like would happen for even the most insignificant new publication put out by the establishment media. There isn't anyone running an advertising budget to put the progressive blogosphere more in the spotlight.

That we've all done as well as we have is a testament to the popular hunger for good information, made easy to access. It speaks volumes about the talent represented among the people who've chosen to show up for our experiment in open source political collaboration.

But again, we seem to have hit the natural limits of this model. If you believe, as I do, that we need to increase our impact on the political discourse and that we need to do so with all possible speed, then we need to grow our audience.

That won't happen solely by sharing, or fighting over, existing traffic amongst ourselves. I won't downplay the importance of blogs promoting each other, I'm just saying that the tools exist to make the progressive blogosphere's portion of internet mindshare bigger overall, independent of links to more obscure blogs from better known blogs.

Anyway, if anything here helps even one of my blog friends get a few more hits a day, I'll be well contented.