Search Engine Optimi-what!??
That’s about where I was the first time I had an SEO-person read my personal blog (I had apparently been “discovered)… and at the time I had no interest whatsoever in SEO, search-engine rankings, or anything else other than reaching my goal of 30 readers.
Little did I know how much those three little letters would rule my life.
The more I delved into writing for other people (instead of for my own entertainment and as a way to vent about my husband without some friend running to him with the whole story), the more I discovered that I was evidently the only blogger in the entire freakin’ universe that didn’t optimize the hell out of everything.
I thought I was being creative and free. I was informed I was wrong, innacurate, untrained, unskilled, and unsearchable.
I must say, though… a few years and a couple crash-courses in SEO (actually a few butt-chewings by the experts), and I have a hell of a lot more than 30 readers.
Touche, Mr. SEO Guy… wherever you are.
This pretty well sums up the understanding I had of SEO for the first few months.
Who am I kidding? I still think it’s about this clear most of the time.
Then, I discovered the power of being ranked well in search engines. The first time I “found” myself in a search, I was exstatic! Pretty sure I blogged about that for about a week straight… promptly sending my pages back into the realm of the unfound. I still had a long way to go.
So I became a keyword fanatic. I put the thesaurus to shame, with all my lovely descriptive words…
I landed in everyone’s spam-box.
Yep… still had a few things to learn.
I’m sure it’s perfectly normal to take months and months to “get there” in the optimization world… right? Right?
It took a while, but I finally got to a place where hearing or seeing “SEO” doesn’t give me nightmares. Most of the time.
Well… sometimes.
