SEO and the Art of the Happy Accident

seo World Wide Web 13 Comments

A better subtitle for this blog could be: “Throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”

I keep an eye on the Google Analytics reports for this site. The past couple of months, there were an unusually large number of hits from people searching for info on Twitter. I just tried a couple of searches on Google.com and Google.ca this morning, and for “twitter purpose” (and a variety of other combinations), we’re showing up near the top of the first page. In the past, we’ve also had searches for people looking for info on Askme.com, DandyId and other specific topics that I’ve written about here.

I think the general principal, one that has relevance for SEO (search engine optimization), is that it’s just about impossible to determine in advance what the zeitgeist of the moment is going to be. As a result, place content on your site that covers a wide range of related topics, and there’s a good chance that something that you write will be relevant to somebody, somewhere, at some point in time.

This is otherwise known as the spaghetti principal – when you don’t know what precisely will work, try a bunch of different things, and record your results. This isn’t a new idea by any means. Bloggers, internet marketers and SEOs use this tactic all the time, in a variety of different ways.

13 responses on “SEO and the Art of the Happy Accident”

  8. Sol

    Yes… the happy accident. Be careful relying on fate for the fates can be fickle and finicky and dash it all. Soon your site may be at the bottom of everything except for searches about “happy spaghetti accidents”… Well probably not.
    speaking of which, at the time of writing there are NO search results (not on goole or clusty or yahoo or live) for the phrase “Happy spaghetti accident”… I expect this will soon change. 😉

    1. Jeremy Lichtman Post author

      I’ve updated the tags on the blog entry for “happy spaghetti accident”.

      Isn’t there a game that people play to find search results that only produce one page on Google? You may well have a leg up on people in the near future…

      Incidentally this is the 100th comment on this blog!

    2. Jeremy Lichtman Post author

      A quick update: there’s at least 15 different combinations of search terms that involve overjoyed pasta and my name that now appear in the Google Analytics account for this site. Sol? You have a lot to answer for! 🙂

  10. Jeremy Lichtman

    A quick update: there's at least 15 different combinations of search terms that involve overjoyed pasta and my name that now appear in the Google Analytics account for this site. Sol? You have a lot to answer for! 🙂

  11. SEOP.com

    I agree! There are times that luck plays a part with your website's ranking. But I also would like to suggest that when you want to do SEO, stick to the basics and put some hard work on it. This is one sure fire way to bring you up on SERPs. But still thanks for the share.