For those who didn’t know, I started an SEO Experiment on October 5, 2009 with a blog post. I had been reading about search engine optimization and link wheels so I wanted to try a little experiment to actually rank for the search phrase “SEO Experiment”. My plan was to build a link wheel with several articles that point to the original blog post as well as to each other.

I had been working on my link wheel and had posted four article “spokes” out of a planned six so far. I have an article on HubPages, eHow, InfoBarrel, and Xomba each with links pointing to that particular blog post. I also wrote the article about why I did the experiment with a link pointing to the post as well as the HubPages article forming a small two link chain.  Furthermore, I placed the original blog post in a blog carnival which gave me another link.  All in all, I would say there are 6 links so far.

I spent some time in Google’s sandbox and had been several days at position 85 before dropping to 285 for the past few days. I assumed it would be awhile before I moved anywhere, but on a whim checked the ranking tonight before heading up to bed. Lo and behold, there I was sitting on page ONE in position number 5! I couldn’t believe it. I had to check it again, but it was still there.

This was absolutely wonderful news to me. Now that I have learned about keywords and everything else that I have learned after my first 100 Hubs, I plan to start looking for more niches to write about and do a better job of coordinating my material across the various sites for which I write. I think this will improve my organic search traffic tremendously which should only help my earnings. Then I will probably even start to look at the possibility of creating my own niche website. It will take some effort to find a niche in which I can effectively compete, but I think I will enjoy the challenge. In the meantime, my earnings at the writing sites will improve.