James Michie, 10 years ago, wrote a post about what he had learned after a year of blogging. Then, this year, he wrote a very short post to revisit and update that list. He wrote:
Ten years on and most of the points in the above post still hold up. Except for number nine, that is. If I were writing the post today, I would say forget about SEO and analytics. Instead double down on point number one. All that matters is what you write.
His original list is good. But I completely agree with his update. I hate SEO. In fact, I think SEO is terrible and one of the biggest wastes of money to hit web development during my career. There are so many SEO specialists that make a lot of money to update a website’s SEO. I think the pressure should be on the search engine to find all sites rather than the website author feeling so much pressure to understand search engines.
And, of course, personal blogs are far better off without analytics than with them.