Lately I upgraded the service on my humor/rant blog, Die Fluffy Wuffy Die!  This gave me access to more comprehensive stats.  I was very pleasantly surprised to see that even though my daily average is only about 60 hits a day, lately I've been getting around 250. 

I've done very little conscious promotion over the last few months.  I've just posted a few comments here and there.  Maybe submitted that blog to a couple of directories.  The traffic building power of those efforts wouldn't have been great. 

I'm pretty sure that the rise is due to one thing above all: frequent posting.

The lesson:  Don't waste energy and time trying to figure out Google's algorithms (or pay some guru who thinks he has!).  And don't get too hung up on page rank.  Just press on, keep at it.  The search engines will reward you for your hard work.