Due to my low revenues from my Suite101.com posts to date, I had little motivation to write articles for that content site this weekend. It seemed to me that blackberry picking would be more profitable (got about a quart). I wanted to push through the discouragement to write a poetry article and a history article. I even brought home some references from the office to maybe write a civil engineering article. Alas, on Friday evening I decided I really should 1) clean-up the articles already written for linking and images, and 2) do some research in SEO: search engine optimization.

The clean-up was easy. I found some public domain photos residing on the Internet, with the site giving permission to copy and use. And I added a bunch of links, internal and external to Suite 101, to my existing articles. I’m probably not done with that, but I’m close. On to SEO.

I found, however, that I couldn’t deal effectively with SEO. I found plenty of references, but my mind was just not in it. I’d pull up a reference, and begin to read, but quickly said to myself, “Is this really necessary? How does this equate to advancing a career in creative writing? How will my ego, demeanor, and pocketbook be bettered by this? And how will this affect my creative writing? Will it diminish my other writing?” Not being able to answer, I kept shifting to mindless computer games–as if Minesweeper will better advance my second career.

By Sunday afternoon I had had enough. Since SEO wasn’t working, I knuckled down and wrote two articles and posted them. One is the last in my series about Robert Frost’s poem “Into My Own.” The other is in my continuing series on the lead-up to the American Revolution, this one on some writing of Samuel Adams. These are probably not any better optimized for SEO than ones I posted earlier. They do, however, have links and images. And today I’m getting some hits for them.

This morning before work I was able to concentrate a little on SEO. I found some good training sites and copied and pasted them into a Word document, and printed a few pages. I think part of my problem is I still have not learned to read stuff on the web for comprehension. I need to learn that to save a tree or two, but I’m not there yet. So my reading material for the evening is in hand. I’m off to plan the next two engineering articles I’ll write.