Yesterday I had one nice surprise when during one of my routine blog visits on my favorite blogs, I ran into Sire’s WassupBlog’s article ‘Googles Latest PR Update In Time For Halloween‘. Sire’s blog just got another boost in PR when it climbed one step up to PR4. He said Google seems to have chosen Halloween to ‘play around with everybody’s PR‘. And then he proceeded to commemorate the occasion with a poem about Google.
Naturally, I also hurried to check out mine and lo and behold, after 7 months of wallowing at PR0, it is now PR1! It’s just one little step and one little PR status, but it meant a lot to me, an amateur blogger. Even the gurus out there would agree with me that the first PR1 status, or the first dollar earned in commission, or the first increase in traffic, etc. is cause for celebration. Thus with this PR1 rank, I jumped in glee and shouted ‘Google rocks!’.
In the midst of my little celebration, I remembered the other site of mine which I put up in August 2009. Checking it up, I got one bigger surprise when it turned up with PR2! What? A 7-month-old blog got PR1, while a 3-month-old site got PR2? I didn’t even know when and if it ever got to PR1 sometime before.
After settling back to normal blood pressure levels, it became clear to me that SEO work does pay.This blog is a personal blog, and as such, it does not have a niche idea or direction (yet). I just write anything that comes up when I am inspired to write, which is not very often. And SEO work is limited to commenting on my favorite blogs. Sometimes I write keyword-optimized articles but I really don’t enjoy it as much as writing extemporaneously. Perhaps due to this light level of SEO work, I got PR1 after 7 months.
The other site of mine on the other hand received a little more serious SEO work. All its articles are optimized for some particular keyphrases with careful consideration of keyphrase density. And I did some focused backlinking too, of course using the keyphrases as anchor links. The site receives about 5 times more traffic than this blog (which is really not much). With this kind of SEO work, I believed the site deserved its PR2 status at its 3rd month of existence.
Like I said a few blog articles ago, I learn as I go along. This day just gave me some confirmation to the things that I read from other bloggers which I considered to be just ‘SEO theories‘ up until yesterday.
Wow, I still feel some tingling at the excitement of my little success. If I were as gifted as Sire, I would have composed a poem of my own too in praise of Google’s algorithms. But poetry being not one of my strong talents, I would just like to end this post with a big thank you to all who deserved to be given thanks to — the visitors (however few they may be), google, my favorite bloggers on whose blogs I enjoy reading and leave comments on and who likewise leave comments on mine, and all beneficial forces both seen and unseen.