How Much Time Do You Devote to SEO?
I had a email discussion chain with my blogging friend Damien Riley the other day about maximizing keywords and leveraging Google AdSense in blog posts.  In this email discussion we shared information about blogging tactics that we use to promote and optimize our blogs and these included how best to find keywords to tag your posts.
With all of the SEO optimization people run on blogs I can easily see why some bloggers take more than two hours to publish a single 400 word post, in most cases I spend more time tagging and optimizing the post than I do just writing the content. This costs lots of time, but may be worth it in the end, as I do have a 60% organic visit rate to my blog, which is visits from Google searches. I have several keywords that are massively popular and I get lots of traffic to a few specific posts related to those.
One of the few tactics I am reading and have not tried yet is to create “Jazzy†descriptions, I have heard that if you use HTML tags in your descriptions it can help your blogs when indexed by Google, this includes making different colors, font styles and formats of the description itself, not talking about in the post. I haven’t met anyone who is doing this with their blogs yet and was wondering if you know anyone who leverages this SEO tactic and if it works for them?
As far as keyword tagging, most bloggers agree to use AdWords or another online tool and find keywords related to your topic that are not over utilized, so that you have a chance to get in the top listings on the Google Search pages. A prime example is that one of my blogs held the #1 spot for a keyword for a very short period of time, and then lost it rapidly as CNN, and other news sources started using the keyword. My blog then slipped down rapidly as the keyword I had used prior to the media lighting the story on fire was basically useless once the other giant sites used it.
This means not only do you have to get keywords that people will actually search for, but you must try and outthink your competitor as even if you tag your blog posts with great keywords, you can see them slip as other sites start using those same keywords you worked so hard to find.
So I must spend about seven to ten hours a week now researching SEO tactics and experimenting with different techniques with an additional 15-20 hours of actually writing blog posts. I was supposed to be decreasing the amount of time that I spend blogging, but have actually increased it as I seek to make my blogs more prevalent in the river styx known as the web.
How many of you bloggers toil over endless hours of SEO, and if you don’t mind I would love to hear your stories regarding what you have tried, and what you experiment with? What disasters have you run into and what successes would you like to share?
My biggest disasters were massive site outages due to SEO PHP plug-ins for wordpress hogging up RAM and causing my hosting provider to shut down many of my blog processes. I want to hear from my readers about this and I will turn this blog post into a SocialSpark Opp.
-Dragon Blogger
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