I used to do search engine optimization (SEO) marketing for a living, and just recently started up consulting again. Not, as I always point out right up front, the URL misdirection and link spam kind. No. The kind where you create human-readable content geared towards providing the information your audience is looking for.

I got started in 2001, worked at it part-time to pay for my first couple years of undergrad, and quit in 2005 to go back to school full time. I started blogging in 2002, and at some point, I realized that all the hard-won markers of success for my clients' web sites came to me easily on my own blog, even if it wasn't getting blogger A List traffic. No one can ever tell me that there isn't value in what we do, even if few of us get paid for it.

In a way, this post has been six and a bit years in the writing. (Has it really been that long? Oh. Well.) I wasn't sure if there'd be an audience for this topic in the political blogosphere before, but considering the frustration I've been hearing from so many bloggers about what seems to be a plateau in traffic that once grew with regularity, we may have reached the limits of natural audience growth. So maybe it's time for something more.

There's more...