google webmaster tool increased ranking???

I'm just learning and testing different backlinking methods to see what is working for me.

I have a page started getting a trickle of traffic since it was posted in early november. It has particularly low competition and it got #23 with just some bookmatking with onlywire.

By around dec 10, its reached #12 and I decide to tried doing 2 web 2.0 posts, one pointing to the page, and a second post as a second tier. And I onlywire'd the second tier. Again just for testing to see for myself if, how, when it might affect the ranking of that page for this keyword.

A couple of days later I was registering another site with google webmaster tools and I said what the heck, I also registered this site with the keyword I'm testing with seo.

Instantly, GWMT could tell I was getting traffic to that specific page for the keyword I was targetting. Less than a week later I see this page is now #3 for same keyword. Now I'm getting about 15 visits a day as opposed 3-5 per day to this page from the same keyword.

I wish I hadn't done that because now I'm not sure if it was my web 2.0 backlinking or registering this site with GWMT is what caused the jump in SERP's.

Is it possible that registering a site with activity can boost serp's?

(I realize so little unique visitors is most likely inconsequential to most of you experts here but for the sake of testing I wanted something that I could rank relatively fast and easy so I can see for myself what is effective)