In most instances, people that stumble on your site from a search engine will see only what appears on their screen. This will be your most recent blog entry. They're not likely to scroll down and see what else is there, nor are they likely to browse your archives. If they don't see what they're looking for in the first couple of seconds, or if they're not 'pulled in' by what you've written, then they're outta there.

This means that in order to retain visitors to your site, you have to make every post a quality post. You have to make your 'last post' the best post of your blog. Until the next one, that is.

I've started using BlogExplosion recently (which is how I stumbled upon Human Advancement), and it's given me a better understanding of how this kind of thing works. As I'm forced to view blogs for 30 seconds, what I find is that IF the very first entry is crap I just sit there and wait for the countdown to be reached and then go to the next blog.

It's more preferable than sitting there and scrolling down to read more of the crap that's sitting there at the top. Finding crap often leads you to more crap if you follow it, but if you sit there and read nothing, you avoid the crap...

But it's given me more of an appreciation for making each of my posts good posts.

You might want to consider BlogExplosion yourself, to get a better idea of this. At the same time, as you browse other people's blogs, other people are forced to browse YOUR blog, so it's a good way of getting traffic to your site. (Thanks Liz :-)