I remember when bloggers would take pride in the obscurity of their blogs, believing wholeheartedly that blogging represented the last true meritocracy of the Internet, a place where if you were a good writer and had interesting things to say, you'd gain a readership. Otherwise, if you were lucky, your Mom might read your occasional ramblings but that was probably it, your brilliance doomed to languish in digital obscurity.

Times change and the way people find information online has evolved from our friend's online recommendations to Google. Google! Google! Google! If you're talking about finding information in the online world, it seems to be the first and almost only place people go to find things, whether they're on a mobile device, sitting at a cafe with their laptop or at a fancy desktop system. Heck, one of the most common search terms on Yahoo is the word "google"!

The techniques and best practices have changed for maximizing the number of readers that find your content too. It continues to be important to have high quality content—after all, what are people going to encounter once they get to your site?—though the best writer in the world isn't going to be a success if their site's at the end of a dusty, isolated, and abandoned e-road.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of both on-page and off-page tactics and this book goes into both areas in great detail, explaining why something is more important than showing how to improve it on your own blog, hands on and with case studies. Not only that, Michael knows that saying "I want to rank well on Google" makes no sense, because you can't begin to have success until you decide for which terms you want to rank. Know the language of your customers, weave that into your content and site and you'll reap the benefit.

I think about SEO in terms of "findability" and when I talk about findability with bloggers, I talk about the benefits of learning how to maximize the chance of someone who is searching for your information, your product, your service, finding you, not a competitor. Sounds good, doesn't it?

That's why you've picked up the right book. Michael has captured all the key concepts associated with both search engine optimization and blogging and neatly explained them in this must-have book for any WordPress blogger. Here's something else to think about: even if you're not using WordPress this is a good read because it'll help explain why search engines already like blogs (lots of fresh, narrowly focused content) and how you can rethink your own approach to blogging and increasing your site traffic.

And who among us bloggers doesn't want more readers, more traffic, and more comments on our blogs?

Dave Taylor

Blogger at AskDaveTaylor.com, DaveOnFilm.com, and APparenting.com