One of the weblogs that I run, Vacuum, has been going for more than 10 years. The last 8 years or so of it are online on Typepad. That's a lot of typing, more than 2000 posts in all.
When I look at the statistics for that weblog, there are a few things that jump out at me. One is simple: a very small handful of posts from the past, where I spent a lot of work to put something together, generate a lot of traffic. In particular, the 50 state power outage maps posting gets search traffic (and links from utility company intranets) and lights up when the lights go dark.
I could not have promised you when I started writing that this would have been the one bit of work that appeals to the world more than anything else I've done to date. It didn't start out as an ambitious plan; rather, it was the end result of watching storms wreck utility infrastructure and wondering how on earth to find a power outage map for some arbitrary city without knowing in advance what utility company serviced that area. The edits that I have accumulated over time - and am still likely to do when there's widespread severe storms or electrical disruptions - have slowly made the piece noteworthy, much more noteworthy than the first draft.
If you are writing and one of your targets is search traffic, be prepared to edit and go back to good posts that get a lot of traffic and use the search keywords that do find the page to make the page better. This is particularly the case if you are writing something that's a big long list. You can notice after the fact that you missed something, and update the list to reflect the new information.
Of course, you don't always have to chase search engine traffic, and optimizing your writing for humans is always better than playing to fickle search algoriths. It may take a while for one piece from the word-hoard you are accumulating to stick out as worthy of further attention and love. Once something sticks out as noteworthy, find the time to polish it up and keep improving it.
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