SEO

One of the best sources of traffic for any website or blog is search engine traffic, because it is often extremely well-targeted. If someone wants to buy a red guitar, they will often go to a search engine and type something like:

* Red guitars
* Buy red guitars
* Where to buy a red guitar

If your site sells or reviews red guitars, you're going to want to rank well for these types of phrases.

The best way to make sure your blog does relatively well in the search engines is to use a good SEO plugin. Depending on your blog platform, it may be difficult or impossible to use a plugin. For example, Blogger or WordPress hosted blogs (hosted on their servers) can't use plugins.

If you use WordPress on your own hosting, there are a couple of very good SEO plugins.

The All-In-One SEO plugin has been around for several years, and it in use by thousands upon thousands of blogs all around the world. It is highly respected and works very well.

And updated version of this plugin is called the Platinum SEO Pack plugin. It has the same features as the All-In-One plugin, but will also automatically do a 301 redirect on any URL that has a change of permalink. So if you change your permalink format, you won't lose any traffic.

These plugins will give you instructions for using them, but they are quite simple. At the bottom of the page when you make or edit a post, there will be a section for adding a custom page title, description, and keywords.
Also, make sure you add tags to all of your posts. There are a number of plugins available to help you do this automatically, but they are pretty inaccurate. Nothing beats adding some related keyword phrases to the post. I like to add at least 5-10 tags per post, but don't add too many.