The Best SEO Theory blog posts of 2007

The SEO Theory blog is now one year old. Although I began posting to Blogger we moved the site to this domain early in the year after Blogger improved its service. For about a month around March I had to let the SEO Theory column languish until we were able to set up this domain.

Over the weekend I took a look at the statistics for the blog when I realized we had reached the one-year mark. Various schemes and ideas have rolled through my head but I don’t have time to implement al the cool stuff. I do have a special treat planned for later this week.

Still, a not-so-quick-and-easy post that might prove interesting would be a year-end recap of which posts were the most “popular”. It’s hard to define “popular” because in some cases these posts drew traffic mostly through organic search results (which has always been the intention), in some cases the posts benefitted from deep links on other sites, and in some cases the posts have been Stumbled, Dugg, Sphunn, and/or otherwise recognized by the social media community.

Search engine optimization is not about link baiting and, contrary to the occasional suggestion that I have engaged in link baiting, I don’t have time for that kind of work. In fact, the most link baity-seeming article was one I knocked off while I was half-asleep and unable to come up with anything useful. But I guess my subconscious had decided it was time to do something worthy of social media.

I haven’t done a great deal to measure the success of SEO Theory, but I’ve been watching a few metrics. One metric is the number of search referrals reporting by Google Analytics. I don’t like Google Analytics as it’s not a very reliable source of information, in my opinion, but it’s an industry standard piece of software and it’s free. I generally estimate that Google Analytics under-reports data by 20-30%. Your mileage may vary but every time I’ve looked under the hood GA has been off by that much. Other Javascript-based metrics programs seem to be no better or worse than GA.

Because of the hiatus in posting and the switch to a new domain this Spring, search referrals declined for a few months from March to May. After May they picked up (June surpassed February, which produced almost twice as many referrals as January). December 2006 saw about 40 referrals. January saw nearly 300 referrals. Just posting five times a week increased search referral traffic almost eight-fold in the course of a month.

November reported over 1700 search referrals. We’re on track for maybe 1400 referrals in December but the holiday shopping season and the fact that most of our traffic now comes from non-search sources. Some months, only 20-21% of SEO Theory’s traffic comes from search referrals, and the most popular query string now is “seo theory” (or some variation thereof) usually followed by “michael martinez” (or “michael martinez seo theory”).

I have had trouble maintaining a 5-post-per-week pace over the past couple of months because I’ve been very busy at work (and I occasionally get sick and don’t feel like posting). Still, I think I’ve been pretty good about keeping the content fresh. So freshness certainly helps improve search engine referrals if not necessarily search engine rankings.

Except for March, not a month has gone by where at least one post did not get several hundred targeted visits. And even in March one of the older posts still received over a hundred targeted visits. Our most popular posts have earned thousands of visits (not including visits to the root URL for the blog).

And some of our most popular pages are not blog posts at all. They are static content pages here on SEO Theory, including our SEO Theory white papers page, our About SEO Theory page, and our root URL (seo-theory.com, not the blog root URL).

With that said, here are the most popular posts by month:
January 2007 – What Does Google Tell You About Your Site?.

February 2007 – Yesteryday’s SEO advice at today’s prices.

March 2007 – Search engine love: now they crawl me, now they don’t. This was actually a late February post and it was the second-most popular post in February.

April 2007 – No Data. I didn’t have time to set up Google Analytics until May so we lost about six weeks’ worth of data.

May 2007 – Google 3.0 – What the Searchology Update means to SEO.

June 2007 – The Relevant Link Myth.

July 2007 – Backlinks – The Beginners Guide To Backlink Theory.

August 2007 – Google Outlaws The Web – Sites No Longer Allowed To Link.

September 2007 – The Pagerank Control Myth and the Nofollow for SEO Myth.

October 2007 – 20 Hardcore SEO Tips (actually, I titled it “20 Hard Core SEO Tips” but a lot of people used the compound form “hardcore”).

November 2007 – 20 Hardcore SEO Tips. Yup. Two months in a row.

December 2007 – An On-page Optimization SEO Checklist. This one is a bit premature as the month is only half over but that was the most popular post so far.

I have not had time to see which posts elicited the most comments, either on-blog or off-blog, but if I had to guess I would say that the 20 Hard Core SEO Tips article probably received the most discussion. A few people tried to lob gratuitous insults at me (one guy even did it in his own forum) and they were for the most part ignored or shouted down. I guess that post really struck a nerve with the community, and the funny thing is that it’s the one article I figured would be most ignored.

However, back when I was writing a weekly column on Tolkien and Middle-earth for Suite101, I often found that my best-performing articles were those I wrote while half-asleep. When I stayed up all night to watch Peter Jackson’s 90-second (or thereabouts) “Internet Preview” for his Lord of the Rings movies (in 2000 or 2001) I waited 4 hours for the download to complete, watched it about 6 times, and spent an hour writing the review. It was quoted in newspapers around the world only hours later and received more traffic than any other article I wrote for that column for the next two years.

Sleep deprivation, however, is not my preferred method for building Web marketing success. I think that showing people you’re interested in providing content for a long time to come is the best approach to building and growing a Web audience.

Some posts really surprised me with their popularity. For example, the Old SEOs Don’t Joke – They Just Make You Laugh post from the end of August made the top 10 for that month and almost got as many visitors as the PageRank Control Myth post did in September. It probably didn’t hurt that Jeremy Zawodny (one of the objects of my gentle humor in the post) linked to SEO Theory with an explicit “I have to admit it made me laugh”.

It’s impossible for me to know how many people regularly visit SEO Theory. Google Analytics thinks about 6,000 people have visited 9 or more times this year (75% of whom came back 25 or more times). Another 6,000 people have apparently visited 2 to 8 times. But I’m not quite sure of what to make of Google Analytics’ numbers.

We’ve had numerous requests from people to publish a full RSS feed, but because this site appears to be popular with spammers I’d rather not make their work easier for them. It would be nice if they would exempt SEO Theory from scraping altogether but I suppose that’s just one of the risks of writing a blog about search engine optimization.

Until recently around 70-80% of SEO Theory’s visitors used Firefox. The number is starting to slide down so it seems that SEO Theory is becoming a little more noticed outside of SEO circles. The things I have refrained from saying about Firefox on this blog — I hate it. It’s the only browser I hate more than I hate Internet Explorer. But, to each their own, I suppose. I still have Firefox installed both at work and at home and I have at least one “SEO tool” installed in both places.

People from nearly every country in the world read SEO Theory. West Africa, Central Africa, and Somalia appear to send no traffic to this blog. A few well-known countries in the Middle East also send no traffic. Greenland and some island nation north of Australia also fail to send us traffic.

Our largest audiences come from the United States and the United Kingdom (specifically England). But we get good representation through Europe and Latin America, too. The average visitor looks at 1.67 pages per visit. Some people look at dozens of pages per visit.

The average amount of time spent on site is down to a little over 2 minutes per visit. Visitors coming from Google, Yahoo!, and AOL spend more time on the site than the average visitor. Yahoo! visitors spend over 3 minutes on the site.

People coming from Google and Live look at nearly 1.9 pages per visit.

The bottom line seems to be that a lot of people are interested in SEO Theory. And the most popular posts tend to be the ones that offer fairly specific advice, although some technique tip posts are outperformed by theoretical posts.

I would have expected people to almost obsess over the link theory and linking technique posts but in fact they are only average performers. So maybe maybe people really are interested in more than just links. Although I don’t have a category here for it, posts that would go well under “SEO mistakes to avoid” seem to work pretty well. People are trying to learn about what NOT to do in search engine optimization.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Theorem of Search Engine Optimization was one the more popular posts.

Of all the “fundamental” posts I’ve made (which have not been that many), only one -->