I'm going to share a link-building strategy (not specific tactics) that has worked exceedingly well for me when it comes to driving traffic to a website. This will not work for everyone because, frankly, few can produce content of high enough quality to make this strategy feasible.

(If you think you're tough enough to hang with this, you need to keep reading.)

This is very interesting. I'm in my sixth week of not being able to type. While I have been out of the game, some enterprising person has taken it upon themselves to build a bunch of icky links to my sites. These are links from spammy Viagara pages, cigarette vendors and a couple of porn pages that even make me blush.

Do these unwanted "bad neighborhood" links hurt SEO? Yes, it seems. Combined with my inability to add fresh content, it may have been very mildly effective (search engine traffic across my sites is off by 14 percent from the monthly norm).

File under: Don't make the same mistakes I made... or maybe not

One of the reasons I more or less abandoned chucklinart.com over the past year is that I was focused on another site, Survive Unemployment! A little over a year ago, you see, I became totally unemployed. Finding a job seemed impossible so I started trying to make money in a million ways. I thought I would try my hand at the internet publishing business, among other things, and I had a great idea.

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.

If you have been following this thing, you have probably been hanging on the edge of your seat. These quixotic quests are great story fodder, aren't they? No matter what happens, the audience gets a good show. If the hero fails, we can laugh at him for being such a fool or lament his tragedy without actually having to experience it firsthand. If the hero succeeds, it gives us hope that we too might someday conquer the insurmountable obstacles in our own lives.

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

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.