SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years

I don't see it that way. The bottomline is, if the asker isn't satisfied with the proposed resolutions the asker might go elsewhere (e.g., DDG). Even if the asker doesn't switch search tools any sense of friction and frustration will trigger less usage, not more. That's not good for Google. It's not good for advertisers.

Pains me to say it, but is in the best interest of the searh engine to maximize the searcher's satisfaction.

I'm actually surprised that many people read blogs still.

I used to spend a lot of time reading a long list of blogs I enjoyed, but I never really got over Google Reader being killed off.

I tried a number of other RSS readers and aggregators, but nothing ever felt as immersive as Google Reader and I lost touch.

The only time I end up on blogs now is a result of a link here, Redit or Twitter, or from an occasional organic search result.

In other words, he's basically just saying that if you write enough good content, people will come, SEO be damned. That's certainly one approach to things sure, but I'd be hesitant to say it's one that'd work in most cases.

Doing what he says is fine and dandy if you've got little to no competition and are operating the site on a purely 'eh if anyone visits that's nice' basis, but it's likely a sure fire way to fail if other people are doing all the other stuff and writing content as good as yours.

Also, some stats would definitely be nice to see here. The number of Twitter and YouTube followers show a creator/site that's moderately popular and getting more so as time goes on, but they don't exactly suggest millions of visitors or tons of number 1 rankings or what not. So some stats would help clear things up there.

Good question; I went and took about what he wrote about this month and I thin I found the answer: he doesn't write about ground breaking ideas every day. Usually, just little tricks he knows or code snippets he's written that might be useful. Two days he just lists printable vs non printable ASCII characters.

So, posting regularly appears less about creating the perfect ideas to blog about and more about just posting something, even if its only an ASCII chart.

Try an ASCII chart; it might make a good initial blog post!

This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, you're right, a more mainstream topic does have a larger potential audience, and if your topic is one few people care about, you're probably gonna get a lot less traffic compared to one with a broader audience.

At the same time however, the broader the audience, the harder it usually is compete and make a name for yourself in a niche. There are hundreds if not thousands of people and sites writing about JavaScript frameworks, Docker, etc, and your work will likely get a lot less attention than theirs will. So while the potential audience is there, the likelihood of you getting said audience is extremely low.

It's like on YouTube with popular games. Sure, a lot of people might watch videos about Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever the kids play nowadays, but there are also thousands of other people also making videos about them, and yours can easily get buried in the avalanche of results there. Hence unless you've already got a one in a million advantage (like real world fame), it's very hard to compete.

Focusing on something less popular can help you build a smaller but more focused audience, and you do pretty well off being 'that one guy' who covers said obscure topic. You can then maybe branch out and gradually use your popularity in said smaller field as the jumping off point for popularity in the larger one.