Alec Saunders, a technology marketing expert, provides several practical tips to increase traffic to your blog. After switching to WordPress and following these tips he's seen an increase in readership from 216 visitors per day, to 3400.

2) Use a Google Sitemap
This allows you to tell search engines what urls are available for crawling

3) Make sure every post has a title
Google looks at the title for information

4) make the titles catchy

5) Link and trackback to others
Google rates sites with more inbound links higher than those with less. when you link to others, they are likely to link back to you

6) use a top level domain

Be a Blogger

1) post frequently and regularly

2) participate in conversations.
Find out who is blogging about the things you care about and comment on their blogs as well as posting to your own

3) write "meaty" posts
Make them rich with information

4) Comment on other blogs
Some blogs provide a link back to you when you comment on them

5) ping aggregators when you post.
Some blogging tools do this automatically, but make sure yours is pinging the ping engines you care about

6) keep a blogroll
Every link is upping that blogs Google ranking, and they will likely respond in kind

Tag everything

1) find out what tags are being used widely on sites like technorati and del.icio.us for the things you write about, and use them to tag your own content.

2) Modify your post template to leverage tags and keywords. use a toll that automatically generates keywords and updates them for every post