where have all loyal readers vanished?!

They bother too much of PR, SEO etc because it has the potential to bring much more traffic than which loyal readers give. High traffic in most of the cases, more traffic results in more money from ads. Now that is for non-personal blogs.

Coming to personal blogs, they should not at all be concerned about seo, pr etc because it no way helps them. I see some people running after them ( not all ). It is probably because they came across to many tech / blogging blogs highlighting the importance of seo without mentioning that it won't work for personal blogs [ in most of the cases ]. 

Coming to those groups of 25-30 people you were talking about, check out this : http://indifictionworkshop.blogspot.in/. Look at the comments on the posts of that blogs. The commenters give a detailed feedback on your writing. 

Very tough it is, to keep readers engrossed. But some are there, some learning to read well. Some yet to be born in blogging arena.

Well - I think what you say still happens. There are a group of people who regularly comment on each other's blog and connect with each other on Facebook. 

I know some people formally form something called blogger triber or whatever. But I don't like such formal groups as it is artificial. I think your blog social network should form naturally through inter personal connects.

I feel a blog should fulfil 2 criteria for someone to follow.

1. Person's writing should be interesting

2. Person should be following you regularly.

Some may argue that only criteria 1 is suffient and fulfilment of criteria 2 feels like back scratching. But fact is there is no dearth of good writers to follow on blog-o-sphere and there are also books competing for your time. So given the choice between 2 bloggers who write equally well and you having time to read only one of them, you would rather follow the one who is following you.

By the way, the link Ranjith has given is not a blogger's community. It is our group of aspiring ficition writers - we have a facebook group where we have discussions on various aspects of writing fiction and every month we have a fiction writing exercise where the judges are winners of previous edition and feedback is also received from other members. 

What is SEO?

She says, "Requesting you all to reply ONLY if you feel the same." 

This statement seems to suggest she might not appreciate hijacking of the thread. 

Sarah - I was thinking about the same thing last month. I do get a few readers from across the world - they found me during some photo contest or writing contest. But Indian bloggers who I interact with come with the if-you-read-me-i'll-read-you mentality. Not all but many! 

I do not have a problem with that at all. Because i do not read every single post someone writes. I follow around 200 bloggers and open their posts only if the topic interests me.

I do try to be a polite blogger and read people (at least once a week) who read/subscribe to me. I think blogging is a mutual connection. So many people have their own blogs that finding only 'readers' will be a challenge.And whether someone writes a personal/tech/gossip or beauty blog, everyone wants to be read. There's nothing wrong with that.

SEO helps people looking for a particular info land on your blog, it should be a good thing. Sad that too many people focus on tricking readers and use black hat SEO techniques.

Sarah - Congratulations on reaching this milestone (in the near future). 3 years is a long time!

On a serious note, irrespective of what kind of blogger one is, if you're looking for real tips and 'tricks'/suggestions for SEO and want to earn properly, shouldn't they check out webmaster forums like digital point and Warrior forum and even Black Hat World (well, they do have white hat SEO section too :P)? Most of the blokes who talk about SEO are outdated tips, even would make things worse considering google always update their search engine mechanism. Its funny that those who preach such SEO tips and those who unfortunately use them, eventually at some point become the victim of panda update and cry about it. People need to be very careful when using such 'tricks' as it may also do more harm than good. Most of these tech bloggers even use automated softwares that prepare content for them and post it. They basically rip a content, use different words and sentence construction method, more or less like a bot. And on top of it, most bloggers like, +1/tweet and comment in eachother's post so there so guaruntee that it really works or not, whether or not they claim- or when people in the comment sections says 'OMG!!!! IT WORKS!!!!! ROAAAAR!!!!". Fun fact: apparently, in a shared hosting if your website is hosted along with other websites that obviously sharing the same IP address hosted in the same server with content that google hates, you get affected by that too? I don't think any of these SEO chaps say that, so there ya go!!!