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.

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.

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.

You're correct that the target phrase isn't particularly high competition and that our Wordpress installation is already fairly SEO optimized, so yeah, I guess it is a little misleading. Good spot.

WRT Boing Boing and Radar, it's really just a case of writing content that appealed to those demographics/authors. We wrote an article that analyzed the changing use of language in UK parliament (all parliament discourse is available in XML files), which BB picked up on. Then we also wrote about potential open source bias in Wikipedia editing, which Radar picked up on (let's not get into that discussion here though!). So no particular secrets, just spending some time doing some research and writing some content off that research.

This is a good practical example of what to do when you're starting off with SEO. There are many posts that overwhelm you with information when you begin. Plus, they're able to show that it works.