The history of writing weblogs includes a time when the search engines absolutely loved content provided in blog format, far more than than those words ever deserved to be considered authoritative or relevant for the topic at hand. A scrap of tech news would appear, and then a legion of tech bloggers would each rewrite that morsel into their own words and link among themselves with bits of quickly formed commentary filling out the bulk. The practice of aggregation - lifting most of someone else's work and publishing it under your name, poorly credited - only added to the excitement.
Search engines change over time, and my sense is that blogs don't get anywhere near the primary attraction from search than they once did. If you are working on building up a body of work, it's better to optimize your writing for human beings than it is to write strictly for search. While you are still going to use tools that make it straightforward for search engines to find you, it's much more likely that you'll get loyal readership from people who will find what you are writing through networks of people.
My experience with looking at the analytics of traffic coming from search on several blogs that I run is that people who appear from search rarely stick around very long and often don't come back. If you want to get regular readership, write for the readers, not for the search engines.
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