The first time I saw Jonathan Richman perform, nigh on 30 years ago, he was in his “second childhood” phase, and got down on all fours to sing “I’m a Little Dinosaur.” He did children’s matinees. He refused to do any material from his seminal first album, no matter how much people begged (and they did, with Freebird-like consistency). For me, it was love at first sight. At the height of the punk movement, when cynicism and nihilism were in vogue, here was a performer, a founding light of that movement (the Sex Pistols even covered him!), who reveled in hope, optimism and childlike innocence. Later, he dropped the overt references to childhood, but never lost that sense of innocence and wonder. (Even in the midst of his divorce, when he vented through bitter songs like “True Love Is Not Nice,” he still managed to pen paeans to the little things like “The Lonely Little Thrift Store”.) Today, Jonathan turns 57. And he’s still touring, recording—and glorying in the little things. If you’re not familiar with him, check him out. Now is the time. Here in the morning of your life.

I don’t talk about my day job too much here, but this is one case where I’m willing to make an exception: ConsumerReports.org has won the People’s Voice Award in the Guides/Ratings/Reviews Webby Award category. I’ll let someone else craft the five-word acceptance speech and get back to working on the (award-winning!) site. Congrats to Yelp, which won the “regular” Webby in this category, and to all of the other winners.

My month-long experiment at optimizing this site has come to a close. Of course, my SEO efforts haven’t ended, but my obsessive attention to my rankings will definitely stop. The result of my work:

Google: #8
Yahoo: #2
Live: #1
Ask: #2

In sum, my work has improved my rankings fairly dramatically on all engines except Google. This seems largely due to the fact that Google hasn’t crawled this site in nearly a month, which means most of the changes I’ve implemented are still invisible to the Big Kahuna. I’ll have to check back in a few weeks to see if there are any changes. In the meantime, here are my Top 5 Tips for Personal Site SEO, based on my experiences over the past month:

1. Update constantly.
This should be obvious, but if you’re running a personal site, it might be hard to do so. Nevertheless, it makes a huge difference, and really is a key factor in all of my improved rankings.

2. Work hard at link-building, but do it honestly.
The easiest way to build links for a personal blog is to participate in online community. Leave comments in other blogs, join forums, and link back to yourself. (Just be aware that some sites use nofollow fairly aggressively, so YMMV.) But be sure to do it in a way that makes sense. Spamming blogs will get you banned, and it’s no fun. Ultimately, you should be participating in community because you want to, not just because you want to get links.

3. Clean up your site.
Get ride of those broken links, set up appropriate internal links, and make sure your URL structure is search friendly. In short, optimize the heck out of your site, and then let it work for you.

4. Use the tools provided by the engines.
Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer are great tools. With YSE, for example, I was able to discover that one reason the village had so much credibility was because it had dozens of incoming links—most of which were from my sidebar. I quickly remedied that.

5. Take it easy.
It’s just your personal site, remember? Just publish great content and don’t sweat over SEO every day. Ranking on the first page when your competition is a a town of 12,000 people, a popular ex-legislator and a bunch of Wikipedia pages ain’t too shabby, and I’m happy to be in such company, even if I’m not in the first position. Yet.

With just two days left to go in this 30-day experiment, I can claim at least one definitive victory: I’m now in the No. 1 position on Live Search. The victory would be sweeter if I could just move the needle even a little on Google, but so far all of my efforts have been for naught. The biggest issue seems to be the fact that Google is crawling this site very infrequently, which means nothing I’ve done over the past month has registered with the Goog. It’s as if I’m in a time warp, where Microsoft and Yahoo are already in the present, while Google is mired in the past. Hopefully that means that, by the time they do get around to crawling this site again, I’ll leapfrog to the top. For now, though, I’ll just have to enjoy my success with the second and third-tier engines (I’m still No. 2 on Yahoo), which ain’t too shabby for a month’s effort.

So, I’m at No. 2 on Yahoo, No. 3, 4 and 5 on Live, and No. 5 on Ask (where my Engadget page is No. 3). Google? Still No. 8, and this site hasn’t been crawled since April 3! On the bright side, according to Google Webmaster Tools, I’m ranked No. 3 for “marc weingarten.” Unfortunately, that bit of data is erroneous. The author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight” rightly owns his own SERP, and I’m nowhere to be found. On the plus side, I really am ranked first for “credo kb35”—though I have no idea why anyone would actually search for that.

* No, that’s not a typo. The search engine giant has really registered this elegant alternative brand, along with some other fine variations such as gewgol and geggle. Maybe I need to register pertoooooooooooon, and see how I rank on that.

Now that I’m about halfway through this exercise, I’ve done quite a bit to make this site more search-engine friendly, including rewriting my meta description text, changing the site title and making sure my keyword is in every single entry. However, there are a few things I’ve decided not to do, even though I know they’d help with my optimization. Specifically, I’m sticking with this Wordpress theme, with its big, honkin’ graphical header. From an SEO perspective, that’s one of the worst things to do; I should have a text-based header that the engines can read. But I really like my header, and this is a personal site after all, so it should have some personality. On a related note, there are plenty of Wordpress themes that are designed specifically with SEO in mind. I have no interest in any of them. This theme fits me like a comfortable old shoe, and it’s served me well for two years. If that means I’m going to languish at #7, so be it—though I’m still determined to use just about every other trick in the book to change that.

Back when I was at Engadget, one of my favorite things to write about was the work of modder extraordinaire Ben Heckendorn, aka Ben Heck. And I still like to keep an eye on him, since he always manages to come up with something cool when he puts his mind and workbench to it. His latest: An Apple IIGS laptop. Site is down now, so he must be getting hammered (thanks, Engadget!). But when it comes up again, it’s well worth a look.

One frustrating thing about this project is the clear delay between any optimization work I do here and the potential results in my Google SERP. According to Google Webmaster Tools, Googlebot hasn’t crawled this site since April 3. That means some of the things I’ve been working on, including link-building, cleaning up broken links and fixing the overall structure of this blog—have yet to make their way into my overall ranking. And there seems to be nothing I can do about it. All of the SEO experts say that the best way to get G’bot to increase its crawl frequency is by updating your site more frequently and get more links. Well, I’m doing both, but it hasn’t helped yet. Of course, SEO isn’t about overnight success; it can take months to improve your rankings. So, I’ll keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting … and checking my Webmaster Dashboard six times a day!

While my Google ranking continues to bounce almost randomly from fourth to eighth place, I can take some consolation from the other keywords that I totally pwn. The best, of course, is Marc Perton—if I didn’t own that one, I’d be pretty cranky. Which, I imagine, is how Jenny Perton feels, since I hold the top two spots on her SERP. Jenny’s Livejournal blog doesn’t even show up in the top 100, despite being constantly updated. I also own a few other top spots, some of which I’m not particularly proud of (I’ve got the top spot for “astoturf,” a misspelling of astroturf, which I have now fixed—I’d rather get it right than own that spot). So, while my efforts to reach the top for my surname may seem quixotic, all hope is not lost. And if worst comes to worst, I can always look for some more words to misspell.

While I’m still thrilled to be close to the top of my Yahoo SERP, Yahoo’s directory has left my shaking my head. Once the way to navigate the Net, Yahoo’s directory has been virtually obsolete for years—for everyone but SEOs, who insist that a Yahoo listing is a sure way to bump up your rank, in part because Google uses the directory to help gauge a site’s authority. I have no idea whether this is true, or if it’s just one of those pieces of SEO lore that has become accepted because nobody’s able to definitively disprove it. If it is true, Google may be the only entity that still places any real stock in the once-great index. Case in point: the directory page that comes up when you search for (of course) Perton. One would expect the index to put sites like the village’s home page at the top, since it has a valid listing under the name Perton. Instead, the top listing is for Find a Church, a U.K. site listing 30,000 churches, one of which just happens to be in Perton. In second place is a PR firm run by someone named Jon Oliver, which is one town over from the village, and in third is an article about Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which has nothing to do with Perton—except for the fact that it’s written by my Uncle Marvin, that is. The rest of the first page is a similar hodgepodge; it includes a Wikipedia article about HD DVD (its tenuous connection: a link to an Engadget post by me in a footnote), another one of Uncle Marvin’s articles about Mexico, and a driving school with about a hundred locations in the U.K., including one in Perton. In short, instead of a definitive index of the most relevant human-curated pages related to the term Perton, it’s a random mix of sites that happen to have a peripheral relationship to the term, most of which wouldn’t make it into the first five pages of a related Google search. Yahoo’s index really was once the best way to search the Net; from 1994, when it was on a student server at Stanford, through about 1996, when AltaVista really hit its stride, I used it daily. But until this week, when I checked it as part of this project, I hadn’t used it in at least 10 years. I suspect I won’t be using it again anytime soon.