Have you ever searched for ‘Songs About Suicide’ in Google?
You’d be surprised how many people search for it. That search query, and variations of it, is searched several hundred times a day, maybe even a thousand or more times. A couple hundred a day land on my Gunaxin article that I wrote back in March of 2009. Do the math and it’s easily my most viewed article on Gunaxin. I’m not particularly happy that an article I wrote more than a year and a half ago is my most-viewed of 2010 but it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Anyway, this article is often the second link on Google’s results when people search for this. I would like to take this opportunity to give the middle finger to anyone who thinks they’re an ‘SEO expert’ because other than writing the article and filling out the standard metadata, I did NOTHING to ‘optimize’ this article to make it second in search results. Companies blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on so-called experts to do exactly what I do with very little effort. I wrote content that people are actually looking for, using the keywords they actually use, as opposed to shoving in ‘optimized’ keywords into content that people aren’t necessarily looking for (which is par for the course for SEO ‘professionals’). If SEO folks always had their way, web pages would be filled with nonsensical words, phrases and internal links with little to no emphasis on good, useful content (aka stuff people actually want to find). The article would be first in Google results when people type those words. Then, when the user lands on the page, they’ll wonder ‘What the hell is this?’ then hastily close the page. Believe it or not, this happens, as my old company was notorious for this, and even launched pages with absolutely no quality assurance for anything other than keywords. They’re morons and failures, because ultimately, Google knew better than to allow those pages to reach the upper tiers of search results. But they did a great job purchasing keywords for Google results! Pretty sad, actually.
Moving on. Why did I wrote ‘Top Ten Songs About Suicide?’ For the same reason I wrote ‘Best Rock Songs About Bells’ and ’50 Rock Songs That Defined the 90s.’ People like reading song lists. But why such a subject? Because, there happen to be several really good songs about suicide, many of which are mainstream rock songs. Stick them on a list and read it. People would read the War and Peace if it were written in list form on the Internet.
How did I pick the songs? Some were no-brainers, others I had to research a bit. Wikipedia even keeps track of these songs. I picked, relatively speaking, the most popular.
So anyway, there you have it. My top article of 2010 was one from 2009, one that hundreds of people land on daily, particularly during the holidays.