First time? I've seen few hobby blogger who don't care about traffic / rank at all. Besides, to get on first time on search engine result, you need to perform SEO (search engine optimization) which might be costly or take some time.
I personally have some blogs that's not really SEO optimized. But it has some readers already and that's good enough. Optimizing SEO really takes a lot of my time and comparing to the cost and benefit of having ranked first on Google search doesn't mean much to me.
Bitcointalk is big enough already, I don't think trying to get first on every SEO-related website is a good thing to pursue too. And anyway, I believe the lack of good bounties contributes more to the traffics compared to the merit system in general.