My problems with your analysis: 1) Content strategists happens to be a very low competition, low volume search term. It shouldn't be especially hard to make the first page. 2) You did in fact optimize your URL for the page that ranked for the target search term. (As well as your H1 tag.) This doesn't support your argument that one can rank well without attention to these items.<p>Meanwhile, I am interested to know how a new blog got links from Boing Boing and O'Reilly Radar. That would be more interesting and useful if you are willing to share.<p>Edit: By the way, low volume is not bad if well targeted, so I'm not disagreeing with your strategy, just with the conclusions drawn about SEO based on this data.