If you are a fellow SEO, you will know and understand the pain we must go through day in day out. A continual cycle of keeping up with search engine optimisation news and never ending feeds of SEO blogs to read. There are days when I wake up and just can’t be bothered to visit the dozen or so SEO blog sites to keep myself updated, however I know that as an SEO, its part of my job to keep up to date with search related news.
Funny thing though was when a colleague of my accused me of “slacking off” at work as all he sees me doing is reading blogs and participating in forums. In his point of view, I would probably be seen as wasting time at work socialising via forums, though the reality is that SEOs must continually read and discuss optimisation topics to share experiences which would ultimately increase their overall understanding of SEO.
Because of the need to continually improve yourself and obtain new optimisation techniques, a search engine optimiser inevitably enters a never ending cycle of studying and keeping up to date with SEO news & techniques. Though this may not be a bad thing, it certainly does take up a lot of time and energy.
I personally spend about 3 hours browsing through endless amounts of information which are being posted on a daily basis. It becomes a habit over a period of time, however it causes me to take my concentration away from things which really matter for a business. Instead of concentrating on actually generating traffic and creating quality content, I spend a lot of my time researching HOW to generate traffic and how to create quality content.
Don’t get me wrong, I still get my job done and I get it done well, it is just the never ending process of creating time to read through the continuous feed of blog posts which really takes its toll on me. As bad as it may sound, I am lucky that I am not the only one who suffers this endless cycle of studying. Heck, I’m glad that there are others out there like me as I usually end up striking up a very productive discussion with them which would further my enlightenment of SEO goodness.
Note: I did not proof read this post, its just a short rant as I’m at work and am really tired from reading so much.
One Comment
Christine Parfitt
Hi Francis,
This is a good post. I know exactly what you mean. I had a long think about it last weekend and what to do about it.
I think that reading the blogs and the forums every day is important and it does make a difference to how well you know your stuff.
I decided to put a limit on the time spent though and develop techniques for getting the most out of the reading time. So for example I’ll make sure I tag blog posts that have good info so I can find them again. I also make notes if I think something will make a good blog post at some point.
The other major change is that I’ve decided to do drafts of my own blog posts in one sitting, probably Saturday, for the following week. It can be flexible but I think having some idea what I’m going to write and having skeleton posts will cut down the time spent. I’m going to try and get my blogging done by a certain time (say 9.30) and then spend the rest of the day on “real” work.
We’ll see how it works out in reality lol.
Hey at least you have a paying job.