Data from two years of blogging with no SEO

SEO == Search Engine Optimization. Google, Bing, and Yahoo didn't even crack 0.5% of your referral sites. If you're not getting traffic from search engines then you're not optimized and ranking for stuff when someone searches. That has nothing to do with the technical stuff like tags and more to do with the actual content.

Looking at the data you provide, Hacker News accounts for almost 1/2 your visits, 1/4 on Twitter, then everything else. (BTW, you don't have % of NEW visits in your post which is a more interesting number to read.) The half life of content on Twitter is 3 hours (http://www.factbrowser.com/facts/3488/) which means you're only really visible for, at best, 1 day.

Promotion on Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are great but, if I were a writer, I would want to see long-term visibility to new readers where I'm NOT promoting yourself. ... Like Google searches.

Assume people are looking to compare Techstars with something else. The #1 search, according to Google Instant search, for "techstars vs (something)" is "techstars vs y combinator" If your post "Given The Opportunity: Should You Do TechStars or YC" showed up on the first page of Google then I would say you've been able to achieve great visibility without SEO. ..... But you don't even show up in the first 5 pages.

So, I think you've confused Search Engine Optimization with visibility. (common mistake, actually)

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Let's look at your data.... You didn't analyse or provide any insight, which is what I think people should DO with data.

(Full disclosure: I'm work in the analytics department for my company. I research and write code to answer these kinds of questions for clients)

2. Are people actually reading your blog?

It says currently that the average pages per visit is about 2 and they're spending 0:52 seconds on your blog. The average adult reads 250-300 words every minute. (http://yhoo.it/SZVfAy) At a glance you average 150-200 word posts. Does that mean they're only reading half of the second page they go to (What is the time on page for second page?) What is the second page? Is it the home page or another blog post?

The data you provide doesn't help to answer that. You didn't mention your "% of Exits". A bounce rate, by definition, is always visits that only visited one page and left. Therefore, "% of Bounce rate" isn't a good metric to look at for you because your average pages per visit is over 1. "% of Exits" sorted by the URL of the page would give you insight into your readers. If your "% of Exits" on your home page is really high, then it may mean your readers aren't finding anything interesting to read. Conversely, if the "% of Exits" is usually a blog post, that's OK, especially if it's their second page, it means they may have read two posts then left.

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3. Are you gaining new readers / are old readers coming back?

You said that the percentage of new visits is 70%. Over the past year is that increasing, decreasing, or going all over the place? What about "% of returning visits?" If you're trying to go after new readers, great job. I would think making sure they return for more later is also important. I don't think you really want to be a one hit wonder.

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4. Are your readers subscribing to your mailing list?

It's on the right side of every page, so I'm guessing you want to make sure people notice it. Nobody wants spam, so if they subscribe you're almost guaranteed they like what you're writing. Are visitors subscribing to your mailing list? Is that number increasing? It's a good thing if they are.

It seems like he's associating SEO with running (Google-)ads, which is simply wrong and therefore this blog post is pretty much nonsense.

The author is talking about driving traffic to the web site. Maybe that is Web User Herding (WUH) or something. Buying adwords to show up at the top of Google's results, creating thousands of inbound links on various sites to increase your page rank, those things are a waste of time unless you're living off your web site and will die if the money stop coming in.

Back when I ran a blog, I did 60k hits in a day once on feb 14th 2007. I stopped writing it in 2008.

My old blog was averaging 15k views/month in 2010, and is now averaging about 12k views/month in 2012.

blog was actively written between 2006 to 2008

Here are the views/year summary:

   2006 -   454,315 views for the year
   2007 - 1,843,164 views for the year,
   2008 - 2,028,296 views for the year
   2009 -   865,304 views for the year
   2010 -   192,581 views for the year
   2011 -   157,805 views for the year
   2012 -   141,126 views for the year

How much traffic did u have 1 month after starting? 3 months? 6 months?

What were some things you started doing that really started boosting traffic?

Its great that he has more viewers since writing for Forbes (I assume), but I don't know what I can learn from this.