What does my list of top 10 Education blog posts of 2013 tell me?

I’ve just finished looking at the statistics for this blog to compile a summary of the top Education blog posts you read during 2013, and thought it might be useful for people if I shared it. And then, at risk of making this a little ‘inside baseball’, I wanted to share what I learnt from the list!

Here’s the list of the top 10 Education blog posts from 2013

1. Windows 8 Education Apps (2013)
2. The 5 factors which affect school performance (2011)
3. Australia Windows Surface RT offer for education (2013)
4. Can your SharePoint become your Learning Management System? (2012)
5. Ten of the best SharePoint university websites (2011)
6. Ten of the best SharePoint school websites (2011)
7. Is there academic pricing for Windows Azure? No, but there’s something better…free Azure (2013)
8. Photo Story 3: Free software for teachers (2012)
9. Connecting Skydrive with Office 365 for education (2012)
10. Why Moodle is better on SharePoint (2011)

So what have I learnt from the list?

1. The top blog page, on Windows 8 Education Apps, had more than twice the readership of the second most popular – so there’s clearly outstanding interest in finding Windows 8 apps for Education!
2. There’s a lot of interest in using SharePoint across education – from building school/university websites, to hosting learning management systems, and integrating between SharePoint and other systems
3. Old blog posts are just as relevant as new ones – there’s a pretty good spread of blog articles written in 2011, 2012 and 2013 in the list.

Any tips for bloggers to get their content read?

And, if you’re interested in blogging and online writing yourself, then here’s some tips I’ve learnt from reviewing this top 10 list which might help you in your own blogging…

1. Using the word ‘free’ still gets interest
2. Lists get read and shared  (The 5 factors…, Ten of the best… etc)
3. Using plain English phrases (that people search on) in my writing pays off.
   For example, if you look at many of my blog posts, you’ll see that I try to use phrases that people might type into a search engine (and I’ll use them in the title, the main text, and often in a headline). I know that pays off in more people arriving at those blog posts through search engines, and I also see it in the way some of those blog posts make it to the top search result on Google and Bing.
   A really specific example: there are probably thousands of web pages which discuss the factors which affect school performance, but few of them actually use the words ‘factors which affect school performance’, so my blog post about it ends up on the top of the search engine results (see this link)