A little over a week ago I stated my goal of bringing this blog back from the dead SEO-wise.

Attention mobile browsers: There is no /mobi, /pda, or /iphone directory. The main site works and looks fine in 90 percent of mobile browsers. Besides, even if I did do a separate mobile site, I would direct you there automatically by detecting your browser and redirecting you so that you wouldn't have to try all the different non-existent directories you've been trying. (FYI, I would put the mobile site in a subdomain like mobile.chucklinart.com, not in a directory.)

So just browse to www.chucklinart.com in your mobile device, and it should work fine. If it doesn't work well in your device, please let me know.

(Note: If you are trying to move a Drupal site to a new host, see the comment.)

As I've written before, one of the great things about Drupal is that it simplifies the management of many domains from one codebase. Surprisingly, Drupal also makes it incredibly easy to move entire websites from one domain (www.example.com) to another (www.anotherexample.com) or from a subdomain (subdomain.example.com) to a main domain (www.example.com). Confused? If you are, you might want to consider getting out of the webmastering business.

What I'm talking about is this: If I wanted to move this entire site from chucklinart.com to funnytechguru.com, I could do it in less than five minutes. Here is how:

Dale Carnegie wrote in How to Win Friends & Influence People
that the way to make anyone like you instantly is to compliment them. This is mostly true -- if and only if the compliment is genuine. "You look especially pretty today, Sally!" is a totally nerdy way to get a girl to like you if you're a guy (or a girl who rolls like that). "Nice tie, Steve," will do for most guys. "I really like the way you..." is a wonderful way to start a compliment.

Dale Carnegie should have issued a caveat about this strategy: If you're full of it or go over the top, it will backfire. Nobody likes an obsequious flatterer. For a true nerd, there is a real danger of coming off that way.

Getting this site's Page Rank mojo back is an experiment. Let me tell you exactly what I hope to learn and how I intend to go about learning it.

Hypotheses:

This domain (chucklinart.com) has been up for about three years which makes it pretty mature. (The domain is mature, not the content, which tends toward childishness occasionally, and that's -- channeling Stuart Smalley -- OK.) At one point it had an amazing page rank of 3. That fell off to 0. Fair enough. The blog has been mostly un-tended for about two years as I chased shiny rainbows elsewhere.

What I propose as an experiment which you can all watch in real time is to get chucklinart.com back to PR 3 using not one paid link. Neither will I solicit links by groveling to other blog owners to pretty please link to my little PR 0 bloggy woggy with the straight-from-the-box theme. Right now I have 18 backlinks from low-authority dinky little blogs like this one so this is an uphill battle.

(Cue Rocky theme song... clear throat, speaking in Rocky voice...)

Get the best of both!

Includes free spreadsheet with all formulas and charts!

Plug in your own numbers and watch the magic.

If you read part one of my little exposition on PPC vs. SEO ROI, you should have noticed that the numbers were simple and unrealistic. Indeed, for illustrative purposes, those numbers produced a 100 percent return on PPC investment which is absurd.

Since I already had the spreadsheet with most of the formulas, I decided to tweak the assumptions a little bit to see how things might play out more realistically. The view from 30,000 feet on that is here.

Light gray is probably the best color

There is a lot of talk about black-hat SEO vs. white-hat SEO. In my humble opinion, most SEO falls into the gray hat category. The whitest of hats ends up getting a little grimy, and black hats fade in the sun. The black hats fade because Uncle Goog ends up giving them a smack upside the head and de-indexing them. If you're smart, you won't engage in the practice. You don't need to. It's not as effective as the those selling crummy SEO tools would have you believe.

If you followed the link above to the About article, you have some idea about what constitutes black-hat SEO. I find the article outdated ("Keyword stuffing?" Have we been beamed back to 1997?) Momentarily, I will add some thoughts about what constitutes black-hat SEO in the Web 2.x world.

First let's define in broad strokes the differences between black-hat, gray-hat, and white-hat optimization techniques:

SEO or PPC: Quality matters

I recently heard a marketing professional say that his firm didn't focus on SEO since search engines only delivered about 5 percent of their traffic, and it made me wonder how long that person will keep their job. This was a young, tech-savvy marketer who was really into social media and spending gobs of money on PPC advertising. Don't get me wrong: Used properly, those tools can be great drivers of traffic, but they're not necessarily the best drivers of profit.

"Think about this," I said, "You're putting nothing into SEO, and it's driving five percent of your traffic." What I didn't say was, "Have you looked at the conversion ratios from SEO as opposed to other traffic sources? I would be willing to bet you have not." No need to be adversarial.

Even if search engines are not your biggest source of traffic, they are probably your best source of traffic.