SEO Oddities - Accidental Search Engine Optimization

Heh, well I was looking through the analytical software I use for Nusuni.com and noticed a bit of an oddity, it was ranked #3 on MSN live for “how to shave your beard” It did have the quotes, so the fact it ranked that high made sense, but I think it is still a bit funny how you can be doing SEO without even knowing it.

I used the phrase once in a post entitled “The Key To Good Search Rankings Part 2.” That one time was more than enough to get it ranked well for a phrase that I least expected.

This has happened to me once before…

A while back I ran a private blog that only my friends knew about (it is not longer in existence, by the way). It ranked #2 on Google for “Exploding Glass” (without quotes) because I wrote a post about a candle I had on my desk that caught fire, became an inferno, and exploded in mid air as I threw it outside. That was my first real encounter with what I call “accidental SEO.”

Accidental SEO is exactly what it sounds like - optimizing a page for an unexpected phrase. In fact, a good chunk (around 10%) of my search traffic is a direct result of accidental SEO. Now, you might be thinking, isn’t that a bit stupid?

After all, the whole point is to target a specific phrase for each post. Go ahead and do that, but why not write like a human as well? Most accidental SEO occurs because the content is written for humans and not for machines. The whole point of SEO is to let the search engines know what the topic of a post is and what its main keywords are, but that does not mean the search engines aren’t picking up other phrases as well.

It might be opposite logic for those who are new to the SEO community, but writing for robots will make your pages rank poorly. Writing for humans is the key to getting a lot of traffic because the robots will read in your main phrases as well as any other phrases that may have been “accidentally” included.

Sure, accidental SEO might result in fairly untargeted (spelling?) traffic, but you never know, the person may not know the ‘net very well and may click an ad. Or heck, they might like your site and subscribe to it.

It’s funny how these things work at times…

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