I've been using the internet for many years now and have spent quite a lot money over the years trying to learn how to market online. Sadly I haven't been successful. It's relatively easy to buy a domain name, get hosting, set up a Wordpress blog, add various plugins and find a nice attractive theme to display your work on. The biggest problem by far is actually getting eyes on your work.
Right from the start I was taught that using the right keywords is key to getting traffic. I spent hours trying to find keywords that I could use that had enough searches but were not overly represented on other websites, often called long-tailed keywords. I even spent money on software to help me with this task (there is always someone on the internet who is happy to take your money). This of course soon became increasingly difficult as everyone was chasing the same keywords to get traffic. In fact, I would get completely bogged down in trying to find the right keywords. This didn't help with the writing process.
Now, if you had deep pockets, which I don't have, you could always buy traffic through things like Adwords (now called Google Ads) which can be really expensive. I've tried that in a small way but quickly realised you have to be really on the mark and have to be sure that you make more money from getting traffic to your site than you spend with Google.
The biggest problem I found with trying to write with search engines in mind was that if I wasn't careful the articles ended up being unreadable, even spammy. They were fine for search engines, but not so good for those who may have wanted to read them. I found having to concentrate on keywords really restrictive. I wanted write stuff that hopefully people would want to read, not what meets a criteria of a search engine.
I haven't done much in terms of SEO or running a self hosted blog for a number of years, so I admit I'm not up to date with how search engines work these days, but my understanding is that they aren't as mechanical, by that I mean they recognise things like context and synonyms. But to be honest, I'm not sure if this is the case.
So I've been trying to workout if it's necessary to be SEO savvy, and concentrate on keywords, when writing on Hive. I have to admit that, although I hadn't been looking out for them until recently, I haven't seen many Hive posts come up on Google when I've been searching for something. The only time Hive articles have appeared has been where I have been searching for Hive related content. Therefore am I right in thinking that traffic to the posts we write in hive come mainly via the communities on Hive, followers and the tags we use? That is, does the majority of traffic to posts come internally?
if this is the case, it makes Hive a much more attractive way of blogging. But am I right? What do you think?