Being an occasional contributor to certain blogs on time management and overcoming procrastination, I have been noticing almost naturally all the activities that I think people are wasting their time on while doing all the SEO work.
Clicking on your own ads in Adsense – oh, some people still do that and are not even shy to talk about it! This is an activity with the lowest ROI you can imagine – you might click out a few bucks but get banned and have to look for other, rather scarce possibilities of the additional advertisement income. Not recommended!
Looking over stats every day – some people do that two or three times a day! How is that going to help you? Using the time wasted on daily statistics overview for more productive activities will make reviewing your weekly statistics much more pleasant.
Clicking on the Google toolbar voting buttons – hey, get a life :). Google doesn’t use that data for anything. Ten seconds a day it took you to vote for your page and against your competitor’s website makes an hour a year. Consider inviting your girlfriend to the restaurant for a dinner and spending time with her. She might even forgive you for all the time you are spending on the internet instead with her :-).
Long-term vs. short-term SEO strategy
With all the recent buzz around the latest Google update, many webmasters are running in circles about their drops in rankings. Sites that were at the top of search engine rankings are nowhere to be found, bad news for those who were dependent on Google for bringing the traffic.
Online rank-checking tools are experiencing their peaks, and forums specialized in SEO, web mastering and internet marketing are bombarded with questions and speculations. I have myself wasted too much time checking ranks over and over, waiting for the stabilization of the whole situation, checking forums and listening to other people’s opinions about what is going on. I was almost tempted to analyze the changes and try to implement the findings on my web to gain back the positions lost.
That would be however an example of time-wasting at its worst. A long time ago, I decided I would follow a long-term strategy, doing the things I think will work in the long term. Departing from a long-term strategy because of some short-term and probably temporary changes were the worst thing I could have done. As soon as Google results will stabilize, or as soon as after the next update, I might be in the same situation again, wasting more hours, maybe even having to back roll the changes done previously.
What is the long-term strategy you ask? To have the best website in my field. Maybe it does not have the most links, maybe it does not have the links from proper neighbourhoods, and maybe it is missing this and that. Nevertheless, it is the best and most comprehensive site in my niche and I know Google will display it at the top eventually. I do not know if it will be with the next update, or in six months, but in the meanwhile, I am working on the further development of the web content-wise. I know Google and I have the same goal. To have the best site listed at the top. I am doing my best to keep it the top site and Google is doing its best to eventually find out and display it in the top five where it belongs.