You've had this happen, I'm sure:
You're standing in a crowded room, carrying on a conversation with three other people, blotting out the background static of a dozen other conversations when, across the room, someone says your name. It's clear as a bell. Now you can suddenly hear everything that person's saying, and you want to know what they said about you, and why.
The human brain is an amazing filter of information. Our subconscious minds are constantly rejecting massive amounts of utterly irrelevant inputs. If they didn't, there's simply no way we could even function. (Incidentally, one of the theories as to why autistic people are paralyzed by human interaction is that they are unable to filter properly - everything is relevant to them.)
One of the biggest concerns about blogging is that it brings journalism to the common person. Now everyone has a voice. That's great, because every human should have the right to speak their mind. That said, I'm not going to find everything that everyone says to be interesting. Sorry, but I'm just not. With everyone speaking at once, I'm going to be just drowning in static, with no way at all to hear what I'm interested in.
Unless there's a filter. With a proper filter, I'm going to find the things I'm interested in. That's what search engines are for, and SEO. I don't believe in "gaming the system", which causes spammy results to bubble to the top. That renders the whole thing useless. What I do believe is what's been said many times - "Content is king." A properly designed system can bring the attention of search engines to relevant content.
Your brain is a search engine. Your name is one of the keywords it's constantly searching for.
