SEO is something you could do every second of every day and never really finish. Eventually you’d experience diminishing returns, but most of us never even approach this level of perfection. For most of us, we have a limited amount of time we can spend on our sites, so we need to be efficient in our optimization efforts.
There’s little more daunting than starting a project you know you’ll never really finish. SEO is less a project with a set end than a series of processes that you constantly refine.
This is where I’m supposed to come in with some instructions to solve the problems outlined already.
I was recently instructed to go through ten sites’ home page’s title tags and report back whether they’d been optimized. It sounds simple, right? Keywords or no? But there’s actually no such thing as optimized. Because those title tags will never be fully optimized. They’ll never be perfect.
So my job is to determine how far they are from perfection. But to do that I’d need to know which keyword phrase would be the best one to target with each home page. I can do research and make my best guess. But really that should start with talking to clients to determine the site’s goals and objectives. Is that what I should do for this assignment? Do I need to hold a meeting with each site’s marketing manager to determine site goals?
There comes a point where you’re aware enough of the right things to do that you stop being able to do things half-assedly. Where once you charged in and changed title tags willy nilly, not really knowing how it should be done, excited about the possibility that making that change would help the site, now you just sit there daunted by the amount of work required to do a good job changing a title tag and unsure you’ll get enough benefit out of it to make it worthwhile.
The truth is that I haven’t had a big win in a while. And there’s nothing less motivating than losses without wins to balance them out.
Sorry to get all SEO diary on you, but the point is that I’m going to have to get over it and just begin again. Do my assignments, use my best judgement, and try hard until I start seeing wins once more. And if you keep optimizing long enough, and ever get into a funk, I think the same will be true for you.
Image by i am marlon.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.