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The struggle is real: Self-serve SEO or pay for page rank? by Laura Legendary
To plagiarize the 80’s pop ditty, everybody wants to rule the world. When it comes to achieving any sort of visibility on Google, there’s not a great deal of room at the top. In fact, d…

A few thoughts of my own.

At the risk of ruffling the feathers of the SEO community, as a blind entrepeneur I’ve found that focusing overly much on the mechanics of search engine optimization detracts from the rest of my business.

Things like Google Analytics, for example, are almost completely inaccessible, and so tracking that kind of data is something I don’t do at this point. I’ve also made a point of not tracking any metrics that prove to be not beneficial, and I’m focusing on creating content that my visitors find useful.

Sometimes, (a lot of the time), that’s shorter posts, curation of resources I use, and (once my writing muscles are up to snuff again), the occasional longer tutorial.

I think that, if you’re concerned about ranking in the search engines, then you will have to be prepared to either spend a lot of money to hire someone to do it for you, (and there are only a handfull of people or businesses I would trust with that task), or you’re going to have to spend a lot of time keeping up with algorythmic changes, along with possibly hiring someone to read and interpret your analytics data.

Things like well-structured content, though, continue to be relevant, even despite the algorythm updates.

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I spent some time today putting a system in place to track the unbillable time I spend on contributions to free software, and when I say contribution I’m being pretty liberal about what counts as contribution: Advocacy, not just code, for example. I believe in the mission of free software, but the fact is free software isn’t without cost, and sometimes that cost can get pretty high. I’m also working out how to document my contributions in my portfolio, including the free accessibility advocacy that I do. This is going to take a little more work and some more research, but I feel it needs to be done. I need to be able to keep track of this stuff so I can limit it when necessary. Right now I’m thinking of setting the limit at ten percent of free time outside of shabbat and festivals, because those are times when no work of any kind is done, as a general rule. I’m not going to get into the exceptions around festivals because it’s a lengthy topic, but to say no work of any kind can be done on festivals would be technically inaccurate. I think ten percent is a reasonable amount of time. It’s not a ton, but it places an upper limit on the time I have available to do this kind of work. I will also document the time spent, although I haven’t decided whether I will publish a weekly or monthly or yearly report. This is going to be an interesting project.

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