I don’t SEO very well

I tend to write the way I think. My thoughts don’t lend themselves to SEO efforts very well. I seem to go on too long, with my sentences bypassing a limit of 20 words almost 50% of the time. My paragraphs are too long. I tend to begin sentences with the same word — I think this comes from my love of good Southern gospel sermons and how a good pastor will whip up a crowd with tempo, timbre, word choice, word emphasis, and delivery energy.

I’ve been told, back when I used to blog a lot (~14 years ago) that my writing is easy to read, and you can hear my voice saying it (if you know my voice). I take that as a compliment to my writing style, and I don’t plan on changing any time soon. So my question is this — should I try to use SEO? I think something is better than nothing, and while I like how I write, I’m not opposed to doing things better.

While we’re talking about it, what does SEO do for a WordPress blog? How does it help optimize my stuff for search engines? I’d like to know.