September 10, 2008

I am finally tackling a chore I have put off doing for eight months. I took over the design and upkeep of my three websites and two blogs last year, but I stuck my head in the sand when it came to “search engine optimization.” I didn’t understand it, and I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it, so I let it slide. Then I heard a podcast by Lynne Lee, who wrote the e-book Optimize Your Website. She spoke in plain English, with a delightful British accent, and I actually understood what she was talking about. So I bought her e-book, which is packed with so much helpful stuff laid out in a very readable format.

Still, I was overwhelmed this week with what had to be done. Keyword research, meta tags, indexing, link popularity, incoming links…argh! The terms and processes are all intertwined, and it’s hard to know where to start.

About the time I was ready to pull out a chunk of hair, I picked up Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers by Susan Shaughnessy. One of the meditations talked about the desire to slash through problems (writing and otherwise) just to get them taken care of. Wham! Chop! However, “most problems in life and in writing aren’t solved by slashing decisively through them. They are teased apart, tendril by tendril, until the whole flows freely. It can help to have a plan.”

And that’s what I did. I decided to “untangle the knot” of search engine optimization. I made a plan, put together a three-ring binder with colored tabs for each section, and made “to do” lists based on what I’d underlined in Lynne Lee’s book. I can handle one small job at a time now.

What writing project of yours is full of knots? How can you untangle them instead of trying to slash through them? Whatever they are, start with the thread nearest you. And be gentle.