George, nice article. You touched on a lot of the things that we’ve (OmniNerd) been dealing with over the last two months. We’ve listed our site in the Open Directory and have posted some links in various wikis to our articles. The results of this effort are slowly becoming apparent. If you search for OmniNerd on any of the major search engines, you get many more matches than you did prior to the launch of our "search engine optimization" campaign.

So I have a few questions for you. How long after you started optimizing your sites was it until you started noticing increases in your PageRank? From what I’ve read, it seems that Google only updates this figure (publicly) every 100 days or so. It’s interesting because if you look in Google’s directory you can search for OmniNerd and get a match. But, if you go to the category that it matches, it won’t list. I can only assume this is due to our current PageRank.

So, let’s assume all goes well and our PageRank jumps a few points. What should we expect? How much increase in traffic does that really equate to? I would assume the biggest different would be that when I search for "understanding search engines" that your article would list much closer to the top.

I guess the real key is patience. None of this stuff is instantaneous. It’s like you said, the best practice is good content. For a site like OmniNerd, that just takes a little bit of time.