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Since the Best SEO Blog was inactive for part of the year, it doesn’t make sense to recap our best articles month by month. Instead, I’ll just recap the top ten most viewed posts for the year.

Top 10 Reasons Your Blog Fails - Written by Nicholas Ramirez, this post reaffirms Ann Smarty’s statement that lists still work (at least for drawing eyeballs, if not links).

Optimizing Other People’s Blogs For Search - Written by Michael Martinez (me), this is another list-oriented article (but it’s not as scannable as Nic’s article). This technique helps you help other bloggers help you. How is that for a Jerry Maguire SEO strategy? Show me the referrals! Show me the referrals!

Intuitive Keyword Research = Topical Insight - Written by Gene Tapang, a former employee and a great SEO technician. Gene went on to cofound Relevant Copy and become a partner in G2 Agency. Gene has a standing invitation to write for Best SEO Blog again but … he seems to be rather busy.

What is Website Structure and Architecture - Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article discusses static pages, persistent pages, dynamic or virtual pages, and transactional dynamic (temporary) pages. And there are several other definitions as well. Half of SEO is definitions and the other half is 50% hard work, 63% dynamic effort, and 10% a good sense of humor.

How To Choose A Web Designer Who Also Understands SEO, Part 1 - Written by Nicholas Ramirez, this post kicked off a short series to help people identify what to look for in an SEO-capable Web designer.

How To Design A Link Building Program - Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article discusses four types of links: brand-building links, visibility-building links, relationship-building links, and crawl-building links.

Advanced On Page Optimization - Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article debunks some of the nonsense you’ll find if you search for “advanced on-page optimization”.

How Do I Build Trusted Links To My Website 2008 - Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article answers a question posed in a query several people entered into search engines. this article advises you to avoid the social media trap that many SEOs have set for themselves and to focus on real link building that places value where it should go.

Natural Link Building - An SEO Oxymoron - Written by Michael Martinez (me), this article tackles the confusion that many SEOs experience over terminology. And if you’re looking for information on mattresses, there is a link to a mattress blog embedded in the article, too. A natural link, that is.

How To Choose A Web Designer Who Also Understands SEO, Part 3 - Written by Nicholas Ramirez, this article closes out his short series of articles on how to pick an SEO-savvy Web designer. It also proves that you lose audience in the second act. Includes pretty pictures.

And this post in itself proves something else: if you don’t have time to come up with a good topic, and it’s the end of the year, you can recap your most popular posts of the year and recycle old material. Seriously, though, these “best of …” type posts are good internal link building methods. Search Engine Land takes the principle of internal reinforcement to the brink of absurdity: they recap all their posts on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

People actually search for “natural link building” advice and techniques. A critical mind will ask what distinguishes “natural link building” from presumably “unnatural link building” or “artificial link building”. There is no unnatural way to build links. There is no artificial way to build links.

Link building is the practice of obtaining links from other sites. It’s all natural, 100% of the time.

It may be that people who search for “natural link building” are more interested in so-called white hat link building or best practices link building.

Or perhaps people who want to know more about “natural link building” are looking for information on how to acquire links without actually building them. A better expression to describe this process would be “link accretion”, “link growth”, or “link acquisition”.

Natural link growth occurs when other people link to your site without any incentive or directive from you (hence, link baiting does not contribute to natural link growth). You attract links naturally because you’re a resource, because you’re popular, or because you’re doing something unusual enough to intrigue people whom you had no idea existed.

Let’s say I write on my personal blog about wanting to buy a new mattress. This is a confusing topic for most people because the mattress industry is highly competitive and uses every legal means available to establish uniqueness for its products. I could point out in my blog post that I went searching for advice online and found the mattress blog. It seems like you can find a blog about almost any topic these days (although I was challenged to find a real blog about the care of felt hats two years ago and did not produce satisfactory results).

I could, actually, point to a felt hat blog today, but I digress….

These are natural links. No one asked me for them. No one suggested what I link to. No one requested specific anchor text. I provided them on my own, of my own free will. To the best of my knowledge, I have no connection with either of these bloggers (both of whom seem to be business people using blogs to promote their businesses…hm…).

You don’t build natural links. They just come out of nowhere, randomly, without any real agenda or strategy behind them. Some sites obtain a lot of natural links, either because they are highly visible, or because they are extremely useful, or both.

I did actually spend time reading the mattress blog when I had some questions about mattress quality recently. I only just grabbed the felting blog link because it looked like the first dedicated felt blog in the list of search results. I can be lazy, too. That’s natural.

I found an interesting query the other day. Someone was searching on the expression “can you lose backlinks?” You don’t find much discussion about losing backlinks in the SEO community but it certainly can and does happen. Here are a few examples of how backlinks vanish:

1. Your linking partner goes offline
2. Your linking partner ceases to exist
3. Your linking partner revises content and “cleans house”
4. Your linking partner replaces HTML links with Javascript links, or embeds “rel=’nofollow’”
5. Your linking partner is filtered, penalized, or banned for violating search engine guidelines
6. You change your page location without implementing a 301-redirect or asking that your partner update your links
7. Your linking partner sells his domain
8. You buy a domain naively thinking you’ll inherit all those links pointing to it
9. You stop paying for your rented link
10. Your linking partner’s page is dropped from the search index

Your linking partner goes offline - Sometimes a Web site goes down long enough that its pages are dropped from search indexes before the problem is resolved. This kind of link loss usually corrects itself once the site comes back online.

Your linking partner ceases to exist - Bad karma, dudes. You wonder why you’re no longer getting referrals from example.com and when you check it out you find a domainer’s park page there. Sometimes, people just let their domains expire and they never renew them.

Your linking partner revises content and “cleans house” - It happens to the best of us. Even major news sites redesign their URLs from time to time. This sucks when content goes behind a subscription-only interface, or when archives are created and content is buried deep in uncrawlable muck.

Your linking partner replaces HTML links with Javascript links, or embeds “rel=’nofollow’” - Every now and then some Web site operators listen to bad SEO advice and they start trying to hoard PageRank. You don’t need their stinking links anyway.

Your linking partner is filtered, penalized, or banned for violating search engine guidelines - If you’ve been getting links from these kinds of sites, you deserve to lose your link credits.

You change your page location without implementing a 301-redirect or asking that your partner update your links - Happens all the time. Don’t feel bad about it. Just update your 301-redirect list. And if you got the links by asking for them, maybe asking for an update will be okay. Be warned: I got tired of updating “partner” links years ago. One guy kept moving his site. Guys like me — we don’t need to link out to someone who keeps changing his URLs.

Your linking partner sells his domain - Bad luck, dude. Oh well, on to the next link.

You buy a domain naively thinking you’ll inherit all those links pointing to it - That’s what you get for paying attention to bad SEO advice. Maybe you’ll get to keep the link credit, and maybe not.

You stop paying for your rented link - It’s a business, and there’s always a downside to any business relationship.

Your linking partner’s page is dropped from the search index - This could just be a temporary thing. It happens all the time to lots of good little sites. Just be patient. It will be recrawled. And if you think you still have reason to agonize, just be glad you’re not the poor slob whose site just vanished from the SERPs.

People have asked why we don’t publish full feeds on SEO Theory and Best SEO Blog. In the past I have provided two reasons for publishing only partial feeds:

1) Web spammers (content scrapers) cannot easily replicate our articles if we don’t publish the full feeds.

2) Forcing people to visit the Web site in order to read full articles acts as an audience filter. If you want the critical information from an informative post, you have to do us the courtesy of actually visiting our Web content.

RSS feeds are replacing email newsletters. Many people like subscribing to RSS feeds so they can scan the article headlines and decide whether to read the content in full. They don’t have to reveal much about their private activity if the full content of articles is pushed to their desktops.

Internet marketers realize they need to monetize their RSS feeds. Some people sell advertising in their articles. Some people sell links. Some people embed links to their monetized content.

The challenge of drawing converting traffic from a full feed is that you have to continually publish new content. You’re competing for attention in an increasing crowded market, where the market is not comprised of you and your business competitors but rather of you and every other feed publisher. You’re not competing for sales but simply for attention.

Forcing the RSS-feed subscribing public to choose between visiting your site and not learning something new acts as a prequalification steps. You know that anyone who visits your site through a feed really wants to know what you have to say. You stand a much better chance of monetizing your Web traffic by analyzing what your hard core audience responds to.

That is, filtering out light-interest feed subscribers from hard core feed subscribers who actually click through to your site helps you evaluate what type of content people really want to know about. The number of subscribers your site has is meaningless if few people actually read what you have to say, much less consider buying whatever you’re selling.

RSS feeds are proving to be no more effective at building loyal customer bases than the free .PDF eBooks were a few years ago. Numerous marketers put together beautiful eBook content to entice people to visit their sites. In many situations, after serving 10s of thousands of downloads, the marketers realized their eBook “customers” were not buying anything.

If you’ve built your blog around the concept of pushing content to a full RSS feed, what is your goal? What is your business objective? How do you measure success (other than number of subscribers)? How loyal are your subscribers? You can test subscriber loyalty by asking your readers to participate in a poll or buy something — to take an action that requires them to actually visit your site and interact with the Web again.

If you achieve better than a 10% response to any test, you’re doing better than most full-feed publishers. If you achieve 10% or less response, you have to ask yourself if simply pushing content out to people who don’t care enough to actually read it is helping you.

A recent forum discussion between two RSS-feed junkies went something like this:

Junkie 1: I get 400 feeds a day but I hardly read them any more.

Junkie 2: Yeah. I’m up to almost 600. I hardly look at the reader any more. There are just too many feeds.

Junkie 1: I actually visit about a dozen sites a day. They are the most important to me.

Junkie 2: I think I look at 5 sites every day, including this forum. The rest of the time, I just depend on random surfing.

I’ve paraphrased the comments to protect the commenters’ privacy. I have heard many people say much the same thing offline. They subscribe to too many feeds to read, so they no longer bother to try keeping up with their feeds.

Before deciding that full feeds are the only way to manage a blog’s RSS service, you should set up a periodic test schedule to track the quality of your readership. You may be shocked to learn just how few people are actually reading what you have to say.

The September 2008 Search Market Share shows that Microsoft continues to shave search visitors off of both Google and Yahoo! Of course, the search market share reports based on number of queries performed still hide what is going on because they fail to filter out the non-search queries that people run at Google. Rank-checking queries and informational queries constitute a significant percentage of Google’s traffic.

As I have noted in the past, even measuring search market share by estimated unique visitors has its drawbacks (a problem that has become so complex I have given up on measuring search market share by Compete’s data).

I feel a more precise measurement would follow the number of referrals that search engines actually send to other sites. But how should that kind of data be measured? You cannot trust your own server logs and analytics, especially if you have historically only tracked progress for Google. If you don’t optimize for Yahoo!, Ask, and Live, you have no reason to expect significant traffic from any of those search services.

Hitslink measures market share according to its aggregated data, from people embedding its analytics code on their sites. They claim to measure 160,000,000 visitors across their network. Now, while that is all well and good, what Hitslink cannot determine is who among their analytics partners is optimizing only for Google. If their analytics customer base favor Google then Hitslink’s data is biased and unreliable.

100,000,000 million people visited Live.com and/or search.msn.com in September 2008. Fewer than 136,000,000 people visited Google.com in the same period. To suggest that Microsoft serves only 4-5% of the search market is ridiculous. On the other hand, if Yahoo! processes more queries than Microsoft, then why does search.yahoo.com receive fewer than 60,000,000 monthly visitors?

The data we’re missing for a proper analysis of the search market can only be found in the search engines’ tracking data, as they all appear to be tracking click-through results now. External estimates of market referral data are all based on incomplete and non-representative samples.

It’s vitally important for SEO technicians to understand which search engines are being used and how much for each vertical. A great deal of wasted effort goes into optimizing for hypercompetitive expressions on Google. Comparable expressions may exist on Yahoo! and Microsoft, where few if any people may be optimizing correctly for those search engines.

Your typical SEO plan should include:

1. Keyword research for Ask
2. Competitive research for Ask
3. Optimization for Ask
4. Keyword research for Google
5. Competitive research for Google
6. Optimization for Google
7. Keyword research for Microsoft
8. Competitive research for Microsoft
9. Optimization for Microsoft
10. Keyword research for Yahoo!
11. Competitive research for Yahoo!
12. Optimization for Yahoo!

Each search engine serves its own audience and maintains its own database. Relying on any one search engine’s data to analyze and optimize for other search engines is uncompetitive and inefficient. Don’t assume that search patterns are the same across all search engines. Things just don’t work that way.