The one thing that keeps me writing is the fact that I know people expect it. It’s what happens when you start a site, it’s what you hope for in fact: people like what you write enough to come back for more. I don’t have ads, I don’t get a lot of links, I don’t even have a purpose. All I have is my urge to write and you, the person reading this.
When you combine this with my unholy love of numbers and charts, the result is me checking my site stats unnecessarily often. I like seeing that someone else has been here, it gives me fuel to write something even when I feel I have nothing to say. This was more true than ever when I looked at my stats this morning and noticed that I’m getting hits for people searching for “25 things about me”.
You’re probably painfully aware that I participated in the 25 things meme earlier this week. Yes, it’s my most popular post right now, but for a two week old site that’s to be expected and it didn’t strike me as particularly odd. But the fact that people are searching for “25 things about me” is interesting. This meme has struck a chord with the people who participated as both writer and reader to such an extent that they’re actively looking for more lists to read. That’s impressive, if you ask me.
So, out of curiosity I did the same search. You know you’ve done the same, trying to put yourself in your reader’s shoes, trying to see what they saw. I searched Google for 25 things about me with no quotation marks just to see what I’d get.
The result was approximately 33 million documents, and my post is the number eleven result. Well now, that’s interesting…
See, as someone who’s not really relying on search for incoming traffic, I don’t pay a lot of attention to SEO. Yes I changed the way my URLs look, but that’s more for my ease of use than anything. Other than that, I don’t have a targeted set of keywords, I don’t run my posts through an analyzer, I don’t tweak the meta data of my pages. I just write, often times sloppily, and cross my fingers that at least one person will read it and get something out of it. So how does someone who doesn’t care and doesn’t try wind up with such a good spot?
Perhaps it’s the fact that this site is new. Or that (so far) it’s being updated relatively often. Maybe it’s some sort of snowball effect from the amount of traffic I got from FriendFeed for that post. Whatever it is, it makes me feel like an SEO savant: good at something without knowing how I’m doing it, how to do it again, or even how to make it useful.
This combined with the fact that many people spend significant time and money to optimize their sites leaves me feeling frustrated. If SEO were truly useful and meaningful, then a site like mine with low traffic and little to no relavence really ought not float so highly in the results. Where are the long-standing blogs that participated, the ones with established readers and higher page ranks? Where are the posts that talk about memes in general while referencing this particular example? Where are the posts talking about how this meme signifies people’s interest and desire to connect with one another even if it’s only a virtual kinship? What about the meta posts, such Mona’s on Pixelbits, which gathered data from the lists of countless participants?
It’s like the old adage about not wanting to join any club that would have me as a member: any search that shows my site so highly in the results makes me question its validity. One hopes that performing a search will return results from high authority sites that are trusted, established, and consistent but who haven’t sresorted to gaming the SEO system. This little exercise only serves to make me sadly aware that this isn’t the case.
On the other hand, perhaps I should just add ‘SEO savant’ to my resume and hope it trumps ‘expert’.
Photo credit: Rsms
