If I've seen it once, I've seen it a thousand times. The most common scenario is that I'll get a new client with little to moderate traffic, fewer than 20 - 50 visitors a day, who is interested in blogging, and wants to know whether it would be worth the effort if no one reads their blog.

My answer, invariably, is that if your area of expertise supports a demand for information in a certain niche, having a reasonable number of targeted visitors won't be the problem. Within a six weeks of coaching (or two to three months if they prefer to read the book), they go from dozens of visitors to hundreds, with the increase coming mostly from search engines.

And that leads to the question - are blogs the new search engine optimization tool? Do you still need to pay thousands of dollars to attempt to capture a keyword ranking?

The answer, of course, is not as simple as it first seems.

It's true that with proper blog configuration, a responsible link strategy, carefully planned blog frequency, and well-thought-out keyword research, you can have more traffic from search engines. But part of the answer also lies in the technology and in the planning.

The idea, contrary to popular belief, isn't to blog for the traffic.

90 - 98% about Why Your Business Should Blog has nothing to do with web traffic. The idea is to maximize the 8 - 10% of the Blog Traffic Equation, not for it to be the point of the exercise. In other words, learn how to let your blog do most of the traffic work for you, so you can blog from your heart and on whatever topic both your current clients and prospects want to know about.

Having said that, even if you don't quite understand how blogs can create additional leverage in traffic from your site, you can learn how to increase traffic to your blog, as well as to the rest of your site. And you can do it without the strain of keeping up with ever-changing DIY SEO tactics.

However, with the wrong technology, or a failure to plan wisely, you can end up spending your time trying to figure out matchmaking techniques between your particular blog and the various search engines, which isn't that much better than the SEO efforts you'd already been making with your site.

So, choose your blog platform and your blog training carefully - learn from those who have the results you want, and have been able to duplicate those conditions for other people. If finding a consultant is too expensive, there are how-to guides and online courses that are worth the return on investment, and offer some from of support.

Under those conditions, though it's not a replacement for the expertise you can get from someone who understands search engines, you can set up even a mature blog to take better advantage of its natural traffic-drawing assets. If you keep a few key things in mind during the set-up of your blog, and stay within a few guidelines when posting, you can, indeed, blog your way to better search engine results.

Just don't make traffic the only point of blogging, or not much of that traffic you work so hard for will stick.