Keeping Up With the Joneses

So, yet again, I’ve been toying with the idea of throwing in the towel and giving up blogging.

Google is such a bear to deal with these days. The so-called SEO tips of yesterday are just not working. It seems to be all about getting a lot of un-reciprocated links as far as I can tell.

So while I am going back to formula in terms of SEO, here are a few strategies I am going to try in order to increase traffic:

• I’m not much of a commenter but I’m going to break the mode and do some.
• Offer up a little more flare, spark, and snark to posts. I can’t simply regurgitate what’s already out there. I need to share my take on issues a little more. This is a little scary. I definitely don’t want to post something that is going to come back to haunt me, but you can’t make any gains without taking chances. I’m looking for a balance here.
• If targeting keywords, not simply repeating “the target keywords” continuously, but mixing it up a bit.

I am also dealing with some behind the scenes issues, which are numerous and never-ending:

• updating databases
• submitting to directories
• validating code
• setting up analytics
• reducing ads to focused products; or eliminating completely on personal blog
• fixing categories and archives to avoid duplicate content issue; I chose to simply have title displays on category pages; others go with excerpts
• adding the all-in-one-seo
• updating blogroll
• updating robots.txt files
• password protecting wp-admin.