My Best Blog Posts of 2013

2013 was a pretty exciting year, and there has been a lot of activity in the search engine optimization industry this past year. Looking back, the updates to the Google Penguin algorithm and Google Penguin Recovery have been the most memorable for me, since I’ve been so involved with companies recovering from “bad SEO practices” in the past several years. but that’s not only what has been interesting. There have been quite a few posts that I didn’t expect to get so popular. With my ultimate goal of writing a blog post each day, there have been quite a few memorable ones. Here’s my wrap-up of my most memorable and best blog posts of 2013.

How to Make Your Links Do Follow Links in Google+ – This was a banner year for me on Google Plus. I’ve worked to build my presence on Google+, and have been pretty successful at it, at the same time. I’ve had a few posts that have received over 5,000 +1s and just as many Shares. But this post stands out.

Never Use a Hyphenated Domain Name for Your Website – If you asked me last year about domain names and hyphens, I would not have thought that I would make this post during 2013. But someone did an experiment that was interesting to watch with memorable results. I’m still on the fence, though, about hyphenated domains. I prefer to not use a hyphen if possible, though. The exception would be a domain for your own name. Like if I couldn’t get billhartzer.com for my own site and all of the good TLDs were taken, I would still go with bill-hartzer.com if I had more of a ‘generic’ or ‘common’ name. That said, you could still rank for your name with a hyphen.

Does Buying Facebook Likes Help Search Engine Rankings? – I cannot believe that people still buy Facebook Likes in the hopes that it will help their Facebook page and even help their search engine rankings. Snake Oil is all I can say.

Regions Bank Fails to Renew Domain Name – Web Site Goes Down – I love to write about these sorts of things. So easy to do but even the most basic things like renewing your company’s domain name WHEN YOU ARE A BANK get messed up. Regions Bank website went down and a lot of their customers were unhappy.

How to Fix Google Analytics to Properly Calculate Bounce Rate – One of my most favorite posts from this past year. This Google Analytics “hack” allows you to actually see the proper data from Google Analytics. This post got a lot of links and people still keep linking to it. Talk about link earning. Really. Perfect example of a link earning blog post. Earn your links by writing about stuff that will help people. And it will get links.

So, there you have it. Not the huge really long list of blog posts that I wrote this past year, but a good overview of a few that had the most traffic for me. There are others that were written even a few years ago that had more traffic in 2013 than I ever had hoped. But these are my best blog posts of the posts I wrote in 2013.