My websites causing stress for me

You know, I have 4 websites. I work hard on every one of them on a daily basis. What am I doing wrong? What am I missing? I have very little traffic to each of these websites. It's starting to cause me stress!!

I ask for reciprocal links...got quite a few for each site. Continually asking for links to add. I have changed the meta tags. I have changed keywords. I have changed and added content to each site. Anyone knows that doing this for 4 sites is a lot of work. Just the maintenance on them is a lot of work.

Anyone got any suggestions? I have tried to optimize each one over and over hoping for the spiders to notice me.

Looking forward to hearing from someone with some knowledge and suggestions.