Once upon a time, in the Golden Age of Blogging, things were simple.  You wrote good material, people found you, the word got out and you had a hit on your hands.  That is only part of the equation now.  Building a blog is simply tougher these days.  Competition is fierce and cutthroat.  There are literally millions of bloggers out there competing.  You not only have to be good but you need to completely understand effective Search Engine Optimization (seo) techniques.
You can write the most elegant prose imaginable, but if you do not understand the following techniques your blog will likely remain empty and alone:
?  Keywords:

Keywords are the phrases you want to be ranked for on search engines (like Google).  To have effective seo you desire to have a keyword density of 2-5% within the blog post.  You also want you main blog page to be optimized toward its own keywords and those keywords should be reflected in your main blog URL.  Your blog post title should also have a title that is keyword optimized for that post’s keywords.

?  Content is King

Content is King is an overused phrase when it comes to effective seo.   It may be overused, but that really does not make the phrase untrue.   You can get people to your blog with poor content but they will not keep coming there.  In the beginning content is not as important.  It is unlikely many are reading your blog.  This just means you have room to grow as a writer.  Eventually when people get there you will need good content.  Quantity is important to.  Think of every post as a door to your blog.  The more doors the more chances of people finding it.  If you have to choose between quality and quantity you should definitely go with quality for seo purposes.

?  Behind the Scenes

There are always little tricks that happen behind the scenes that make things work.  Effective SEO techniques for bloggers aren’t any different.  Optimized URL’s as mentioned before is the primary key.  Meta Name and Meta Description Tags are two of the important ones.

?  Site Design

The opposite of behind the scenes is the blogs presentation.  Design can make or break a blog.  If the blog is too cluttered, too hard to navigate or just plain UGLY people will not stay.  There really is a lot going on with site design that is not seen at first.  The best option is to start simple and continue to test and refine.   If your site is VERY hard to navigate it can actually stop the search engines from effectively indexing your site.  Which is as close to a cardinal sin as you can get for site design.

?  Use a sitemap.

This is another of those “behind the scenes” things.  It is important enough to have it’s own entry though.  A sitemap is a must.  This will alleviate the issue of a search engine possible getting “lost” on your site.  It doesn’t take much to make one.  A simple plug-in on Wordpress  but a blog would be foolish not to follow this simple SEO technique.

That is it for “on site”  SEO techniques for bloggers but what about the stuff that happens offline?

?  Backlinks

Backlinks are the 800 pound Gorilla of the SEO and Blogging world.  A backlink (also called an inbound link) Is a link TO your blog or post from another site.  Think of every backlink as a vote of confidence for the blog or post in the eyes of Google. “Votes” from some places are worth more though.  Effective backlinking is an article all to itself, though.  If you want to have good SEO techniques for a blog you need to do more research in into effective backlinking.

?  Social Bookmarking Submission and sharing.

Social bookmarks count as a certain amount of a “vote” too.  Sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumble Upon are great for this.  Sharing your link and getting MORE people to add it too makes it even better.  This is all separate from the fact that those sites can ALSO drive traffic to you.  Neglect to socially bookmark at your own peril.

All of these effective SEO techniques for bloggers sound much more complicated that they really are.  The only thing that cannot be “fixed” later is your blog and post titles.  You can even go back to old articles and rewrite them for more effective SEO.  Take care in choosing those titles and get started.  SEO skills will come in with a little time and practice.