SEO Experiment -- First Milestone Not Reached

If you've been following, you know that I'm on a mission to bring this blog back from the dead with regard to its Page Rank. Incoming links have grown steadily through a "nice guy" strategy of linking out and hoping the favor is returned. It's too early to draw any firm conclusions on that, but so far it seems to work. According to Google Webmaster Tools, links to this site increased from 18 to their current 159. An impressive 71 new links were generated to the main page. This was done with no real effort on my part beyond dropping "good neighbor" links to others whose content I enjoy.

The bad news is that I failed to reach my first goal -- PR1 by 10/1. The site is still at PR0. Oh well. It's not the end of the world. I suppose that if I had been more aggressive about backlinking, I could have made the goal. This month, I am going to drop some backlinks of my own -- not a lot, mind you -- just to see how much of a difference it makes. I will let you know how that goes.

Traffic was up a bit (1645 unique human visitors in September. Compared with 259 in June, that's not too bad.), and search traffic was up a lot (site found on 122 different search phrases in September compared to 48 search phrases in August), confirming the already widely known notion that fresh content and activity on a site give it some search juice. I have also found that updating old pages that have dropped in the SERPS helps them bubble back up to the top.

I hope you found that useful. Sorry it wasn't the most entertaining post. I'm not in a joking mood today.