How Much Time Do You Spend Actually Doing SEO

How much time do you spend doing SEO per day? Or, specifically, how much time do you waste reading about SEO instead of doing it? Unless you are beginner who is still learning, if you’re spending more than an hour reading about SEO everyday, you’re probably wasting your time.

While the SEO space is filled with “news,” drama, and attention seeking behavior (also known as ASB), there simply isn’t a significant amount of important changes that go on in SEO on a daily basis. If you’re spending all day reading blogs, forums, and links on twitter, you’re acting a lot more like a social media manager than an SEO. Fortunately, there is a simple solution, but you’ve gotta go cold turkey. For one week, stop reading your rss feeds, forums, and twitter. When you come back, give yourself 2 hours to read what’s most important. If you stay within the 2 hour limit, you’ll be able to identify what you think are the most important things you need to read and forget the rest.

To get this done, you’re going to need to use one or two curators like SEO roundtable or sphinn (which has improved dramatically since dropping user voting–see friends and scorpions). You could also try subscribing to the SEO book forum. No, it’s not free, but IMHO it’s worth it (and yes that’s an aff link, but I’d recommend it anyway). If you’re looking for another source, try my new Facebook page. I’m experimenting and will put up one to two articles per day. It will be a mix of old and new articles but will always be high quality information, including things I think will help you learn and (more importantly) think about SEO.

With all that extra time, you should actually start doing more SEO. The number one thing you should do is more testing and less believing in what some guru writes or blogs and tells you is true. You will be a better SEO for it. Spend time creating great, link worthy content or doing a content audit or any other maintenance work that makes your website leaner and meaner and removes the dead wood.

The key to being an expert in any field is knowing what 5 percent of knowledge really matters and finding a balance between theory and hands on experience. So are you ready to stop reading and start doing? Or are you just going to stay where you are …?