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 I find the article outdated ("Keyword stuffing?"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.

Things have changed, Charlie Brown!

The buzz is all about Caffeine these days. Google is making major changes to the algo, and I think I have some idea of what they're up to. It changes everything for the better.

Conventional wisdom says there are two kinds of SEO: internal and external. Internal SEO is what you do within your own site (keyword density, meta tags, W3C compliance) and external SEO is what you do on the rest of the web (link building).

If only it were that simple! To successfully SEO a site or page (this page and site are not optimized, by the way, because they are only designed to draw people who Google my name, Chuck Linart, and the site is well optimized for that) you have to learn to think like a search engine. Search engines "think" differently now than they did even six months ago.

Here are seven elements of successful SEO at the dawn of the Caffeine era, based on my testing:

Getting thousands of people to visit a website is easy, but attracting several dozen people who want what you offer is more difficult. If the right people don't find you, you're just burning up the server's CPU for no good reason.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to SEO.