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:

1. The most important factor in SEO is now targeted content of high quality. Much of conventional wisdom no longer applies. (And thank goodness for that.) A few examples:
• Keyword weight and density -- yes, you have to have your keywords in there. No, they don't need to be of any particular weight or density.
• Backlinks -- they help, but you can climb in the SERPs without them, and it is now nearly impossible to build them yourself. They must be gained organically.
• Page Rank -- a PR0 article that is well written will eventually place higher in search results than a PR8 article that is not particularly interesting to its readers.
• The "Description" meta tag is now very important. (Explanation: It is what shows in the SERPs. A good meta description will get more clicks, and more clicks will help you to rise.)

To test the above, I will pay no attention to keyword weight, do very little to actively obtain backlinks, check results for my little PR0 posts against higher-ranking sites, use the meta descriptions in half of my posts and not use them in the other half and compare results.

2. White-hats beat black hats eventually/black hatters eventually accomplish nothing but their own demise.

To test this, I will deploy no black-hat techniques and explicitly invite my black-hat competitors to pull no punches in trying to sabotage my efforts. I will report periodically on the shenanigans of black hatters, which I have found more and more nefarious and sophisticated on some of my other sites but, fortunately, less and less effective for the most part.

3. The effectiveness of social networking depends on the quality of relationships developed, not the quantity of links posted.

To test this, I will actively participate in social networking sites like Twitter, focusing on making friends with like-minded people rather than on posting lots of links to my own content. As a control, I will spam the heck out of social networks using different accounts and pointing those links to another site of mine that has lost its mojo.

Metrics:

Let's keep this simple. I will report only three metrics and use only one tool -- Google Webmaster -- for the sake of consistency. To be reported:

Backlinks -- these currently stand at 18
Page Rank -- currently zero
Search Position -- Those posts that rise to the front page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing will be analyzed to see how they might have arrived there.

If my hypotheses are correct, both the number of backlinks and page rank these should rise steadily, and a number of posts should achieve decent rankings for long-tail keywords.

Other considerations:

I will not use any SEO tools, including my favorite, WebCEO (Disclosure: I stand to gain monetarily if you try WebCEO after clicking that link.). The logic behind this is that, as I said, I think the conventional wisdom no longer applies in a lot of cases, and those tools -- no matter how good -- all rely on conventional wisdom. The only tool deployed will be Google Webmaster, and it will only be used for measurement.

The focus will be on providing interesting, informative content.

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