SEO? Search engine optimization? On this site? Naw! I am hidden in a small corner of the internet playing with prompts, content, concepts, and neuroplasticity. I appreciate the intimacy of the neighborhood that we, my fellow bloggers, and I play in. I don’t particularly want to convert it from a country lane to a superhighway.
I appreciate how SEO is critically important to a business; traffic is king. Attracting the visitor, encouraging them to explore the products, and committing to buy is the rationale of the site. Not here. Here is about exploring, amusing, and sometimes provoking.
The site did have its beginnings as a place for me to showcase my woodcarving craft, and it remains that. If you look, you’ll find pages and posts dedicated to carving techniques, my approach to carving, and specific works – especially boat and ship portraiture. The COVID pandemic changed that. I ceased doing boat shows, which were my primary means of marketing for commissions.
The site started as a place where people who found me at the boat shows could learn more about my craft and interact with me after the show. When the opportunity to do shows returned, I found that I no longer had the energy or youth for the rigor of committing to three or four days away from home. Lugging tools, tables, samples, and products for sale all over much of the East Coast was not easy. And I was away from my family. So you could say that COVID had a momentous effect on both my business and this site.
During the pandemic, shows were canceled, and I was bored. I began to write posts based on prompts to entertain myself. Then I became drawn into a group of regularly interacting bloggers who read and reacted to each other’s posts, and I found a sort of digitally mediated community. Frankly, it kept me from becoming a total slob working on my computer remotely, avoiding social contact and drinking coffee till noon in my pajamas. OK, I still do the latter some days.
But what’s that neuroplasticity thing that got stuck in? Simple. As you age, you become aware that if you don’t use it, you lose it. I’m not one for those games and crosswords they advise for mental flexibility. But I do like to natter on. So the prompts and my own proclivities offer generous room for me to be creative, exercise my mind, and hopefully entertain the readers who are generous with their time and stop by.
Thanks for visiting, and SEO be damned!
What are your strategies for SEO?
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Agreed. Nonsense question.
I think most of us who are personal or hobby bloggers don’t really care about SEO. I do use categories and tags on my posts so that I can search for posts with similar tags or on similar topics, but that is not for SEO purposes.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the Rank Math stuff. Frankly, I didn’t understand any of it, and there was no glossary or guide. I found it incomprehensible and useless.
I’m wondering more and more what I’m even doing here, but I don’t have an answer so here I am. SEO? I started this as a place to market my novels but seriously? I know how consummately unlikely historical fiction about obscure (to English speakers) Swiss history is to excite anyone. I never had any illusions about that. I don’t even care. 😆
Like my initial desire to sell carving. I’m here on WordPress for very different reasons now. And why I am here has a lot to do with colleagues and friends like you. We do indeed form a digitally mediated community. Maybe the ego boost and sales are not what we expected. But there are valuable interactions none the less.
Yep — maybe more valuable.