It was six weeks ago when my home page launched , and it only now appears in Google as the top search result for my name. It wasn't a gradual climb either - all of a sudden it jumped from result 15 to 1. Why the sudden jump? I have no idea -- the content wasn't updated recently, and Google's Webmaster tools didn’t say anything. It could be a number of small changes I made in the past weeks that were finally analyzed, or it could be some obscure temporal feature in Google’s ranking algorithm. Perhaps each time Google crawled the site, it had a little more content, and a better link structure. But honestly, I have no idea.

This might explain why SEO is such an anecdotal process. Without being able to immediately see the effects of your optimizations, it’s impossible to tell exactly how you came about your ranking. The best you can do is read the disparate advice about SEO and try some of the tactics. And then wait several weeks.

For people that depend on Google's organic traffic, this could be a dilemma. If a subtle change you made weeks ago cause a dramatic shift in your search ranking, how exactly do you pinpoint the issue?

Either way, being the first entry for my name has a couple of nice benefits:

• When people search for my name, they'll click on something I control.
• II'll be spending much less time worrying about SEO, and more time on the content