The Best SEO Theory Blog Posts of 2008

I launched the SEO Theory blog on December 17, 2006. Last year at this time I shared the best SEO Theory blog posts of 2007, so I figured I might as well do it again this year and make it a tradition.

Since I was only able to report on December midway last year (and this year), I thought I should start off this post with December 2007. Also, you won’t find all these posts indexed in the search engines any more (although these links should help). When we redesigned the SEO Theory blog, we changed the URL structure. Many old pages fell out of the indexes. We intentionally did not 301-redirect the old URLs because — well, because it would have been a lot of work and I was curious to see what impact the change would have on our search referrals.

Analysis will follow the list:

December, 2007 – Domain Names Don’t Matter For SEO. I did not say so at the time, but this post was inspired by yet another forum debate over the value of domain names to SEO. If you want a boost in your relevance scoring, inserting keywords into the URL works just fine (and the boost is pretty small anyway).

January, 2008 – Optimizing Time For Search. This post talked about strong and weak links, and described what I called the Google Sandbox Effect 2.0. As popular as this post was, however, it was not nearly as popular as our SEO Myths category, which received almost twice as much traffic that month as the top post. Our Search Engine Optimization category also beat out “Optimizing Time For Search”.

February, 2008 – Why Rand Fishkin’s Nofollow Post Was Wrong gave the blog’s front page a run for its money, drawing about 60% as much traffic as SEO Theory’s home page. This post outperformed the next most popular post by a factor of almost 2-to-1.

March, 2008 – Principles of Advanced Search Engine Optimization claimed the most traffic, beating out a popular post about why your contact page needs 500 links.

April, 2008 – Four Advanced SEO Practices captured the most interest in April.

May, 2008 – Meta Tags Do Matter – Get It Right For A Change took SEOmoz’s Sarah Bird to task for dismissing meta tags. She handled the criticism very gracefully and I have to admit I have been influenced by her graciousness to not be so harsh toward her remarks. Besides which, her legal articles are an immensely valuable resource for the SEO and Web marketing communities. I’d rather not be part of any hostile environment for her. Nonetheless, this was the most popular article for May (and the “get it right for a change” remark was actually intended for the entire SEO community).

June, 2008 – Is Black Hat SEO Advanced Enough To Be Called Advanced SEO was, admittedly, a link baity piece. I was inspired by a debate that came roaring out of the 2008 SMX Advanced conference, which I think was started by Lisa Barone who complained that SMX Advanced had embraced black hat SEO a little too closely for her comfort.

July, 2008 – Google Passes Second Link’s Anchor Text was perhaps one of the most controversial articles I’ve ever written. It got me flamed and brought in thousands of visitors. The point of the article, however, was probably lost in the controversy. I was challenging the credibility of the tests being used to support a specific belief in the SEO community — in general, the observations appear to be right (usually only the first link to a destination counts) but no one has yet explained WHY that is so. The tests supposedly proving this observation were all invalid, and I was able to show that you CAN construct a test where a second link on a page passes anchor text to the same destination.

The second most popular post for July was Why I No Longer Blog For SEOmoz. It received a lot of attention, too.

August, 2008 – Secret SEO Secrets That Should Remain Secret SEO Sauce proved that long, alliterative titles can indeed be popular with the reading public. Don’t ask me why, but I don’t think it has anything to do with how many links you put on a page.

September, 2008 – A Guide To One-Way Link Building was a rare post in that it actually drew more traffic than the home page of SEO Theory. I wrote this post in response to some truly horrific one-way linking advice I had seen in an SEO forum (which shall remain nameless).

October, 2008 – 20 More Hard Core SEO Tips gave a solid performance but it has not attracted nearly as much traffic as the original 20 Hard Core SEO Tips I wrote in October 2007. I actually thought this year’s list was more doable than last year’s list (less theoretical, more practical). Item 1 was written in response to a blog that criticized SEO Theory for being unscannable. The blogger implied I must not be getting any traffic with my unscannable posts.

November, 2008 – Wordpress Spam Hack – Unauthorized Include File class-mail.php proved to be a popular article, I suppose because so many people use Wordpress. While it really has nothing to do with SEO, it does rank well for “wordpress spam hack”.

December, 2008 – So far this month, the Wordpress spam hack post is still leading in popularity, closely followed by Basic Web Site Conversion Theory. I guess we’ll have to wait until next year to see which article wins out.

MY ANALYSIS

I detect three trends in the popularity of articles for 2008. First, people really seem to like the advanced SEO material, even if it’s just opinion. I can understand the desire to delve into the deeper issues of search engine optimization but I’ve noticed a lowered enthusiasm for this month’s theoretical articles. If I get too involved in the math and science aspects of SEO, people’s eyes sort of glaze over.

Second, there was a Rand Fishkin effect that I really wasn’t aiming for. I don’t agree with everything Rand and his team advocate over on SEOmoz, but then I don’t write glowing articles praising the things they say and do with which I actually agree. So some people in the SEO community got the wrong impression that I was trying to bring Rand down or something (which, even if I wanted to, I would not be able to do).

Third, people do seem to want some very specific advice on how to optimize for search. Although I could easily provide a lot of optimization tips, even my well eventually runs dry and there are days when I struggle to come up with what I feel are interesting topics for SEO Theory. Nonetheless, when I decided to reactivate the Best SEO Blog earlier this year I felt it would be a better vehicle for straight SEO advice. To that end, I have been trying to post two articles a week there with specific SEO advice. And Nic Ramirez from my team is also now posting articles.

Year-over-year, SEO Theory received almost twice as many referrals from other sites in 2008 as in 2007. The blog received almost five times as many search referrals in 2008 as in 2007. In 2007, search referrals accounted for about 20% of traffic to SEO Theory. In 2008 they accounted for about 35%.

Just writing one article a day, five days a week, you can nearly double your search referral traffic in one year. However, keep in mind that you’ll eventually reach a plateau where instead of 1 article a day you’ll have to add 2 articles a day, and so on and so forth.

You don’t have to buy links, swap links, or DIGG, Sphinn, and Stumble yourself to build your traffic. You can certainly get more traffic by doing all those things but, frankly, no one has convinced me that it’s worth all the time, effort, and money people invest in the processes. SEO Theory readers have often Stumbled, DUGG, and Sphunn this blog. It’s not like I’ve cut social media out of the picture. Rather, I’m just letting the reading audience decide for itself what is worthy of mention.

Many articles on this blog rank first for targeted expressions, but the most popular posts lists from last year and this year indicate to me that targeting expressions is not as efficient as simply writing good, interesting content. Many of the articles I have written for SEO Theory were inspired by keyword referral strings, but only two of the top posts for 2008 were based on that kind of research.

Which just goes to show that keyword research only helps so much. It is actually more efficient to NOT target keyword expressions and to just write natural copy that people find to be appealing and informative — regardless of how scannable or otherwise artificially constructed it may be.

That may be the most important tip I can share with you this year. I hope it was worth the wait.

I’ll see you in the SERPs.