A recent spike in traffic reminded me to keep my eye on the calendar. 

While the season (or, rather, the SEOson) hasn't drastically changed recently, in many parts of the United States students are graduating and it's basically officially Commencement season.  As a result, people online are doing more searches on topics related to graduations, universities, high schools, and the such. 

In particular for one of my personal blogs (for which I don't do much SEO at all, by the way), I got a 60%+ lift in visitors this past week primarily due to many searches on a gentleman by the name of Randy Pausch.  Pausch left his job as professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University after finding out he had pancreatic cancer, which is typically fatal several months after your doctor tells you have it.  A New York Times article about his inspiration is available if you click here.

Anyhoo, the reason why my traffic was spiking is because of a post I wrote that pointed to a YouTube.com video of a lecture Pausch gave that was inspirational in February of this year.  The original speech was given earlier about "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."  Several months after posting and just recently, news was released about how Pausch and the VERY popular Al Gore were delivering the commencement speech at Carnegie Melon.  Searches for "randy pausch graduation speech", randy pausch carnegie graduation" and many other permutations starting popping up on my Wordpress stats. 

Thus, the reminder not only to me, but to all of you, is that seasonal queries will occur for many different events and holidays throughout the year.  If you have the content ready for those queries, you may also see that spike in traffic as well. While it isn't necessarily a constant driver of traffic, it could be a regular boost that you may need if worded just right, and if you pick in my case, the right people or the right topic to have written a while back.  While it wasn't strategically planned out, I'm glad my heart and my friends' hearts who probably forwarded me the video are warm to inspiration.  The searches recently proved to me many others' hearts also like a little inspiration.