Search engine optimization for your blog can be a complicated process even for a seasoned web user or developer. If it search engine criteria wasn't in a state of constant then learning what is best for your pages would just be a matter of reading a book or two or attending a one day seminar.
The trick is to always be aware of trends in online marketing and make sure you move with the times. Search engines are constantly ranking websites on a number of different things. If you take two football blogs with exactly the same content and compare them but one has its pages Meta tags filled in correctly. Which do you think will rank higher in search engines, the one that tells the engine what the blog is about in the tags or the one that says nothing?
It's rather obvious when you think about it but it's not always obvious what you have to do to achieve optimization, let alone good optimization. Try out things on your own blog like creating your two identical pages but have one that has the page title in the URL.
Then try exactly the same thing but with the title of the page in the URL and you'll soon see that the page title and URL are as important as the Meta tags and description of your page. The text on your page is without doubt the most important aspect of your optimization. Web crawlers run over your pages and analyze every bit of your text.
Something that has been around for years are back links which; as the name suggests, link back in to your site. In the past it was a good idea to get as many back links from as many places as you could. There were even schemes around which operated as a link exchange so that you got links to your site in return for links to others.
This is an especially good example of something that was a huge trend a few years ago but has unfortunately had it's best days. Search engines now recognize when links are reciprocal and rate your site better if you have more linking in then you actually link to.
The content of the sites that link in to your blog is important as the engines rank on your sites relevancy. Basically the idea of a good search tool is to send people to somewhere relevant to the search term. A blog that is relevant to the subject searched on is likely to have other sites that are also relevant linking in to it.
To put it in a nutshell, there are a hundred thousand things that are or have been good methods of optimization. The best thing someone could do is talk to someone that does it for a career or invest in some software that can take care of most of it. Whatever you decide to do, search engine optimization for your blog is something you need to get right.