Team Carnival asks: What's my best blog post?

For this round of the carnival, the bloggers were asked to revisit their old posts and share what they consider their best.

I've been blogging for more than 5 years now. But I've never really thought of looking back at my posts until Team Carnival said so.

Well, I won't consider this my best blog post ever because it was written compellingly and with absolutely flawless grammar. I make mistakes once in a while, I admit. But I consider this post one that has made an impact in me because it added by knowledge in what we call search engine optimization.

My blog post on the Valley Golf incident, of which the names Pangandaman and Dela Paz became well-known (or infamous, perhaps?), was a testament on the power of links and SEO. In this post, I linked to news reports and other blogs that stated their story. Apparently, days after I posted this, I saw my URL on the first page of Google Search Results for the terms "valley golf" and "nasser pangandaman." My readership also increased by then, though I was also actively exchanging links with other bloggers that time. But the surge in readership, as attested by the analytics in Wordpress, was something that caught me by surprise. People were reading my blog! Yay!

The same thing also happened in other posts like the one about the Jejemon. A day after, I saw a great increase in readership. My blog link also appeared as a related topic on Chico Garcia's blog once. Even Global Voices quoted a portion of my blog. Wow!

From those posts, I learned that linking and tagging is a powerful tool in blogging. Of course, having keyword-rich posts (and original, mind you) also helps in promoting your blog in Google. That's what makes them my best posts for the past years I've been blogging. And they push me to write better, too.