One of the many questions I see popping up from time to time asks how to optimize your blog for either social traffic or search engine traffic or a combination of both. The "or" part of the question is easily solved. The "combination" part of the question is a little more difficult to answer.
Why would you want to differentiate between the two or combine the two in the first place? It all depends on which kind of traffic interests you the most. Are you trying to gain a large and loyal readership or are you trying to make money with your blog? Are you trying to do both at the same time?
Social Traffic
Social traffic relies on interaction and communication. Interaction includes commenting on other blogs, participating in discussions at social websites, participating in public forums and using social tools. Communication includes the same things plus instant messaging, email, and other various services. If you're interested in social traffic only, the best use of your time includes all of these activities.
Rather than beat a dead horse with a stick, I'll point you to Maki at Dosh Dosh, who's written extensively on social networking. You need only browse his Social Media Marketing category to get a wealth of information about it. Andy Beard delves fairly deep into social website operations.
Search Engine Traffic
Search engine traffic relies very little on social interaction and communication. Your goal with search engines is to rank as high as possible in the search engine results pages. Ideally, you want to be at the number 1 position, but getting on the first page (the top 10 in Google) for competitive keywords is difficult in itself. Getting to number 1 with noncompetitive keywords and phrases is extremely easy. I've been doing it for at least a month and half without trying very hard.
Again, I'll point you to where the wealth of information about search engine traffic is published. Blogger Unleashed and How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Blog Appearance
If you're optimizing for social traffic, your blog needs to be attractive and appealing. You need to include social widgets to show others that you're a social person. You need to link to everyone and their brother in your regular postings, in your static pages, in your widgets or in all of them.
If you're optimizing for search engine traffic, you merely need a basic blog. Fancy widgets are unnecessary. You only link to relevant websites. Your blog can be just short of ugly.
If you're optimizing for both, you include the social things that bring more traffic, ignoring anything that doesn't. Your blog still needs to look good to social visitors.
Timing is Everything, or Is It?
When you're writing for a social audience, you have to publish your posts just before the most people will see it, especially if you're looking for quick hits from social websites. The countdown to getting to the front page of some of them starts when the first person submits an article for you. Publishing during the slow parts of the day can cause the submission to fail in getting there more often than not.
When you're writing for search engines, it doesn't matter what time you publish, unless you can figure out when the crawlers are going to hit your site.
What I try to do is publish everything during the slow hours, before my target audience gets out of bed in the morning. It affords me the best opportunity for getting traffic from the waking up crowd. I'm not too concerned with getting to the front page of anything.
General and Niche Blogs
Niche blogs go after a targeted market segment for social traffic, search engine traffic, or both. The entire blog is aimed at that audience. Every article published is there to entice visits from either traffic source.
General blogs, comprised mostly of personal blogs like mine, are much more difficult to aim at any particular audience. Some articles go after the social traffic, while some articles go after the search engine traffic. Some of them go after both. Search engine-oriented articles tend to be less appealing to social visitors, both in content and appearance.
I try to combine both traffic sources, but I'm aware that it also doesn't work very well. I won't complain, though, because my overall traffic has increased tenfold in a year.
Conclusion
When I want to see which way I want to go, and especially since I want to do both, I look to Courtney Tuttle at Court's Internet Marketing School. While he concentrates on niche marketing, there's quite a bit of resources at your disposal there, including search engine optimized WordPress themes.
There are right ways and there are wrong ways to optimize for social traffic and search engine traffic. I suggest you do a lot of reading at the links I provided above. Whatever route you decide to take, or change direction to, requires that you have the proper knowledge from the best sources at all times.
I've merely scratched the surface of this topic and I'd like to hear your thoughts, especially if you've been doing this a while.
