How to maintain a successful blog?

[Jake]

For one thing, make you page load faster, taking several seconds to load causes a percentage of people to "Bounce" before the site even loads, these bounds rates tend to harm your search engine ranking, just your header image alone is 450K, if you pre-sized it fit the page and used a lower jpeg compression quality setting, you could get it down to closer to 45K, carefully tuning the sizing and compression of other images will speed the load time for people with moderate connection speed. Clear the cache of your browser to get a fairer look at the first time visitor load time.

Here's a Search Engine Optimization primer by an SEO authority, too much of the stuff taught by others is out of date or simply inaccurate.
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Search engines like text more than images, try to be more verbose when it fits, links from other sits are pretty essential for search ranking as well.