Tale of two links

How powerful are links? Let me count the ways!
My day job, I am web developer at a graduate school at a private univ. Last thurs I was in a meeting where someone wanted to buy clicks (through google of course) to our site using the keywords "graduate school of bla bla" ...For this important key word combination we came up on the fourth page of results as #34.

I thought I'd see what I could do to improve the rankings organically.

On Friday, I renamed a page on the site "Graduate School of Bla Bla - The RealName of School" On that page the header is "Graduate School of Bla Bla" and I changed the first sentence of the first paragraph to read. The RealName of School is a leading graduate school of bla bla. Paragraph goes on to blab about the curriculum.

On Saturday, I linked to this page using the text "graduate school of bla bla" from a blog I had running on the same domain but different host. I went to delicio.us and created a brand new account and linked the words again "graduate school of bla bla" to the same page.

My results on sunday morning were - top of second page #11, and #12.

sunday evening: first page #6
Monday morning: first page #10
Monday evening: first page #6

I'm not going to touch it for a while now. But, I was surprised at how quick and how little I did. The domain is an .edu but I am competing with a bunch of other .edu sites for this phrase.

From 34 to 6 in 3 days pretty rockin!!